Published on Aug 13, 2013 by ReasonTV
In April 2013, police officers and a social worker from Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services entered the home of Anna and Alex Nikolayev and took their baby, Sammy, away from them. They had no warrant.
“What they’d done was, basically, kidnapped our child with the help of police,” says Alex Nikolayev. The young, first-time parents were not notified of where Sammy was being taken and wouldn’t find out for a full 24 hours. According to the Nikolayevs, the dispute stemmed from the parents’ desire to obtain a second medical opinion before subjecting Sammy to major heart surgery.
The Nikolayev’s story made national headlines thanks to footage from a camcorder Anna Nikolayev set up on the kitchen table. It also caught the attention of California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who spearheaded an audit of the agency.
“The secrecy by which CPS operates is a massive problem. Because when you have secrecy and unchecked power, you have a recipe for corruption and abuse,” says Donnelly.
The secrecy surrounding CPS stems from the nature of California’s juvenile dependency courts, which only allow limited press access and seal all court records. While media and other interested parties can petition the court to open the records, this can be a lengthy process and by no means guarantees results. ReasonTV petitioned the court to open the records in the Nikolayev’s case and, almost two months later, we have still not received a ruling from the judge.
The issue of funding is one that many critics of CPS are quick to raise, most prominently and frequently by the late Georgia state senator Nancy Schaefer. While the funding incentives for any government agency are complicated and seemingly impossible to divine, Orange County Social Services Agency Director Michael Riley, who oversees Orange County CPS, testified in a deposition related to Hardwick’s case that putting more children into the foster system can boost the agency’s budget.
“Let’s say you spend ten dollars a year. So, then, for the following year, your base then would be ten dollars,” says Riley. The lawyer questioning Riley then points out that failure to use the entire base would result in a lowering of the base for the next year. He then asks Riley if the funding stream is tied to how many children they bring into Orange County’s children’s home, Orangewood.
“It’s tied to the number of children we have in the foster system,” says Riley.
We reached out to both Sacramento County and Orange County Social Services Agencies in the production of this story, and representatives with both were happy to talk with us. However, because of the closed dependency courts, neither representative could comment on details of specific cases. The absurdity of this charade reached such heights that Sherri Heller, who runs Sacramento County’s Health and Human Services, told us that she could not even confirm nor deny that Sacramento County CPS was even involved in the Nikolayev case, despite widespread reporting and video evidence that it was. It’s not just parents and children who suffer from the secrecy. CPS workers and their managers say they are not happy about this situation either and feel that more openness and transparency would help them to communicate their side of the story clearly.
“Most of us in this field are eager for the public to understand what happened and why,” says Heller. “It is a source of great dismay to us when we are accused of hiding behind the confidentiality law.”
In the immediate wake of the Nikolayev case, parents gathered in Sacramento to support the audit and testify in front of the audit committee. The audit is set to proceed in the next few months, and the auditor will choose three county agencies to examine. But for parents like Deanna Hardwick, who’s experienced the power of this agency first-hand, a state-level audit is just the beginning of a broader movement towards transparency and accountability.
“Once the American people are able to be made aware that this is going on, I think that will be a real step forward towards making sure that there’s accountability and making sure that the agency is working towards keeping families together rather than separating them,” says Hardwick.
About 10 minutes.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller.
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This article highlights the very essential need to protect your children and if social services get involved or you think they are going to get involved then RECORD everything, on video and audio regardless of the rights or wrongs of it, record every conversation whether in person or on the phone, ensure they are logged, kept in order and make copies and place them with other people to keep them safe.
Never speak to them on your own, have someone with you at any time, do not allow them to speak to your child without an independent adult with them if you are not allowed to be there, who will be told to halt closed or suggestive questioning or attempts to “gaslight” children by using auto suggestion by planting false memories of incidence in a child’s mind and exploiting a child’s willingness to please adult’s and confabulating on the planted false memories and that independent adult will terminate the session if such an instance occurs.
Don’t try and be clever with these people, they are predatory, don’t try and coach a child into saying things that are not true but make the child aware that they are under no compulsion whatsoever to answer any questions and have the rights to having their parents or someone sitting with them.
I am “Angry Grandparent” because they stole my grandchildren and before that put my family and I through 16 years of hell, they never got my daughters but they stole my grandsons instead using lies and fabrication
you speak the truth, Angry Grandparent. The state stealing children is the worst possible outcome, but even just going through an investigation (where the children are not removed, or are briefly removed and then returned) is traumatic to children and adults in the family. It is ALL horrible. The trauma is seared into you. This is deliberate, IMO. We need to keep hammering away at this, increasing awareness. Far too many people do not believe this can happen to them, so they feel safe. Kind of the same arguments I hear about the surveillance state, i.e. “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I’m not worried.” Well, the CPS kidnappings are happening to innocent families who have done nothing wrong. Yes, it CAN happen to you.
I never recovered from it, I am in my second year of severe PTSD, severe agitated depression and clinical heartbreak attributed by these heartless monsters, 16 long, long years and then they moved in for the kill and it is doubtful if I will remain on this earth for much longer as I now have heart problems, peripheral vascular disease, I had none of this before they tore me apart.
The UK has always been somewhat suspect to its children, in Victorian times they were enslaved by companies and so many died a young death such as the well known match factory girl of poetry whose jaw was rotted off by phosphorous, when laws were passed outlawing this, the UK started selling children to colonists and in the 1950’s so many children went to Australia etc and disappeared, some killed, some worked to death, some abused horrendously, now with no empire the UK steals children from good working class families and sells them to upper class families in what is a huge fraud scam and at every level workers or carers are literally helping themselves to thousands of pounds every month because the UK government reimburses without question any bill sent in regarding a child, one foster carer was caught going to Asda’s to buy stuff, using the receipt multiple times for different children, getting the reimbursement then taking the clothes back for a full refund and buying clothes for the children from a second hand shop.
But most foster carers work their money out thus: £300 per child for themselves and £100 a child for “the hand that feeds them” e.g. that £100 is divided between the various council workers who keep that carer “stocked up” which would be £50 a week per child to the social worker and £50 a week usually to the director who greases the axles of this corruption.
Here’s the youtube vid I made soon after:
My heart goes out to you, Angry Grandparent. I will watch your video this evening when I am home from work. I know the unimaginable, inconsolable heart pain you speak of. I felt it myself, as though it were a knife, when I was under their lying “investigation.” This is a very real attack by these psychopathic beasts. There are remedies for healing, but the barriers are great. For example, the constant triggering. The PTSD can be devastating.
You are absolutely right — they are heartless monsters. Literally.
CPS is ‘legal’ destruction of the family for the profit of human trafficking.
People can go there to buy children by paying an ‘administration fee’
and viola they get a kid. Background checks are somewhat of a joke…it’s mostly about profit. Insidious…claiming to protect the children only to turn around and sell them.
-flek
In my humble opinion, this is ample justification to shoot CPS workers on sight.
Anyone who’s in the baby-snatching business should expect to be shot at by angry parents. (or Angry Grandparent)
If this were well-publicized I think we’d see CPS workers dropping like flies, and it might be the only action “to protect the children” that actually does protect them.