With growing awareness of—and recent public outcry against—the kinds of inequities people of color or limited means face when they come in contact with the criminal justice system, some prosecutors’ offices and law enforcement agencies have changed the way they fight crime.
But there has not been a similar day of reckoning for government actors in the child welfare system, such as New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), said David Shalleck-Klein, who earlier this year founded the not-for-profit Family Justice Law Center (FJLC), a first-of-its-kind organization that intends to engage in affirmative litigation with the agency—hitting it with lawsuits to potentially hold it accountable for allegedly violating families’ constitutional rights via heavy-handed investigatory and removal tactics.
