NEW YORK CITY ACS DEFENSE LAWYER

 ACS workers are trained to obtain cooperation from parents. In this endeavor, they have what are called hard and soft tactics. One of the most effective soft tactics that they have is to tell the parent in the beginning of the investigation that they (the acs workers) doesn't even know why they are there and the investigation " should be closed soon."  This has the affect of putting the parent at ease. Then, the ACS worker will return to the home and state that their " supervisor" has told them they must take services from ACS or face a case being filed against them in family court. This scenario can vary a little but the outcome is always the same. The parent cannot understand how the case went from being closed to the parents having to do services. These tricks used by ACS workers are akin to the used car salesman using his "manager" as a higher authority. Unfortunatey, we are dealing with the safety of children and the rights of parents. The goal o...

Officer Charged in Murder of Son, 8, Kept in Freezing Garage, Police Say “Get your hands off his mouth”: Audio was captured hours before the boy’s death at the hands of his N.Y.P.D. father, officials said. Officer Michael Valva was arrested and charged on Friday with killing his 8-year-old son. Credit... Johnny Milano for The New York Times By  Rebecca Liebson Jan. 24, 2020 The voices were captured by household surveillance equipment. “Get your hand off his mouth,” a woman says. “There’s people everywhere.” The woman, Angela Pollina, was talking to her fiancé, Michael Valva, a New York City police officer. The mouth she was urging him to remove his hand from belonged to his son, Thomas, an 8-year-old with autism, officials said. Not long after the recording was made, the authorities said, Thomas Valva was dead. He had been kept overnight in the couple’s unheated Long Island garage as the temperature outside plunged t...

He Didn’t Abuse His Daughter. The State Took Her Anyway. An unwed father hopes his case will change the way courts decide what it means to be a parent. For the first five years of his daughter Amanda’s life , Ping N., a restaurant manager in Manhattan, lived with his little girl and her mother. He tucked her into bed at night and enjoyed spoiling her with her favorite snacks, like fish balls, egg tarts and ramen noodles. This story was produced in partnership with  The New York Times . But when child welfare officials found that Amanda’s mother had inflicted excessive corporal punishment on her in 2013, they removed the girl from the home. Even though court records show that Ping had never committed abuse and was not present when it took place, a judge later decided that he would lose his daughter, too. Ping could not have custody or any say in her life anymore. The reason was a quirk of New York State law: He and Amanda’s mother were not married when she was born, ...

Opinion: City is Spinning Child-Welfare Stats By   Richard Wexler  |   March 28, 2019 RECOMMEND TWEET   EMAIL PRINT MORE NYC MMR Were there a hotline to which one could report statistics abuse, the leaders of  New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services would have their rights to their spreadsheet software terminated. ACS Commissioner David Hansell’s  recent column  for  City Limits  is only the latest example.  The agency regularly cherry-picks data to disguise the fact that, under Hansell’s leadership, ACS has retreated from reform and subjected more children to the enormous trauma of needless foster care. Consider the matter of time frames.  When it suites him, Hansell is willing to go back decades, in effect taking credit for the accomplishments of others in reducing the number of children in foster care on any given day. But when it comes to the number of children torn from their families in the mos...