With this said, a lot has been made that the familes will sue, or plan to sue, or have sued. I checked and there has not been a suit filed.

Everyone bashing the parties here doesn’t know all the facts and issues and needs to keep quiet until it all pans out. More importantly, if you were a lawyer and had your own business would you turn down a case that has a chance for profit for your business? Get real people.

Without knowing the numerator and the denominator, that statistic is meaningless–especially since it includes “children” as old as 22 who get into gang wars. And a majority of the 157 deaths resulted from “premature birth or low birth weight,” which has nothing to do with foster care.

Lots of people have jobs that require them to carry out particular tasks within a certain range of activity, neither under- nor over-performing. Law firm associates, for instance, are generally required to bill a certain minimum number of hours. When an associate falls well below that minimum, somehow no one ever says that the associate shouldn’t be fired for fear that such disciplinary action would lead other associates to pad their hours over-zealously. No, the underperformer gets fired, and those who break the rules in the opposite direction face appropriate discipline as well.

That same logic applies to Child Services as well. Punish the underperformers and punish the zealots. But it’s not true to suggest that we have to write off the deaths of a certain number of poor kids as the inevitable price to pay to ensure that some nice middle-class family doesn’t get hassled once in a while.

Here’s a Post editorial that discusses the need to get the balance right and not pardon one error or the other.