More trouble for Fresno County CPS: Nearly 60 children in custody on runaway status
Fresno County’s child welfare system, thrust into the spotlight this week for housing kids in a downtown Fresno office, has another problem: many of its wards go missing or run away.
Currently, there are nearly 60 county dependents on runaway status.
Some of them have walked out of the CWS Office, the county’s main hub for Child Protective Services, according to data and interviews.
Staff can’t stop youth from exiting the office, but sometimes social workers follow them in cars and try to convince them to get into the vehicle. Others are found by Fresno police officers hours or days later.
One minor under Fresno County’s custody stole a county car and wrecked it.
No one in the community was hurt when the youth crashed the county’s car, said Lorraine Ramirez, a veteran social worker with the Fresno County Department of Social Services’ child welfare agency.
While staff don’t know if the youth was running away or just wanted to go for a ride, some children run away because they miss home or people they know, others leave to use drugs, or for other reasons. A few years ago, two girls got picked up outside the building on L Street in downtown Fresno by their “pimps,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez, a member of the SEIU 521 labor union, said social workers “can’t force a child or place hands on a child to stop them from running.”
“They can walk out the door,” she told The Bee on Friday. “We can’t stop them from leaving the building, and that’s another issue that we have — is that these kids can come and go as they please because we can’t stop them.”
Until Thursday, a Fresno Bee story revealed, children were staying at the downtown CWS Office while awaiting permanent placement after being removed from their parents’ custody, or after having “blown” their placements.
This year, the Fresno Police Department has responded to 134 calls for service at the CWS office; all but three were for runaways or missing juveniles.
Felipe Uribe, an assistant public information officer with the Fresno Police Department, said the address listed on the call for service can either be where the juvenile ran away from, or the best address to contact the reporting party.
“The time that these children are ‘missing’ can vary from just a couple of hours to several days,” he said in an email about juveniles missing in general.
The Fresno County Department of Social Services works with the court and law enforcement to diligently search for the missing dependents to ensure their safety and well-being, according to Fresno County spokeswoman Sonja Dosti.
As of Friday, Dosti said, there were 58 child welfare dependents under the Fresno County Juvenile Court’s jurisdiction who were on runaway status.
The runaways represent 2% of the 2,700 children in the county’s custody. Running away is the reason for an average of 6% of the placement changes that happen, Dosti said.
Youth often run away for short periods of time before returning to their current placement or to their social worker for assistance.
“When a youth runs away, law enforcement is notified and given as much information as possible to assist, including if the youth may be at risk or a victim of commercial sexual exploitation,” Dosti wrote in an email.
A social worker is co-located with the Fresno Police Department’s Child Abuse and Missing Persons Unit who assists on these cases, she said.
In the city of Fresno, this year alone, there have been over 900 calls for service regarding runaway juveniles, Uribe said. “That includes private homes and foster homes,” he said.
Fresno police, however, don’t track those calls by whether the child is in foster care, so there isn’t a specific breakdown of how many of the more than 900 calls involved foster children.
“Most of them are teenagers who are not allowed to leave their home for whatever reason it may be, but they walk out without permission either way,” Uribe said. “By law, foster homes are required to file a missing person’s report whenever the child leaves without permission, even if they know where the child may be going to.”
Ramirez, the social worker, said staff usually wait around 30 minutes before they notify police when a child is missing from the CWS Office.
“Maybe they just had to cool off or maybe they just got tired of being in the building,” she said. “We’ll attempt to look around the local area, and then if we can’t find them, we contact the law enforcement.”
Safety of runaways is a challenge
Safety is a “huge” challenge when children under Fresno County’s custody run away, Ramirez said.
“They can be out there using drugs, they can be out there prostituting, they can be out there just hanging out and then decide, ‘OK, I’m coming back,’” she said. “We’ve dealt with all of it.”
Ramirez recalled the instances a few years ago when two girls staying temporarily at the CWS Office would get picked up by their pimps on L Street.
“They take off and say, ‘OK I’m leaving, I’ll be back,’ go do their business, and then come back to the office,” she said. “And there’s nothing that we can do about it.”
Around the same time period, she said, girls at the CWS Office were recruiting other girls to run away together.
“We haven’t had that recently but for a while it was an issue,” Ramirez said.
Juveniles still run away for other reasons. Ramirez described the situation as “constant with kids running in and out of that building.”
Some come back under the influence or with items, such as razors, and attempt to hurt themselves, she said.
“There’s a lot of issues regarding safety when these kids go, not just for the kids, the runners that are leaving, but the kids that we have in the building at the time when these runners are coming back, and for the safety of the staff,” she said.
Social workers find themselves in a “very stressful situation” while on the job, Ramirez said. Social workers have a job they can’t mentally clock out of at 5 p.m. she said.
“It’s very heart-wrenching when you have to take this job home with you,” she said. “You worry about the kids. You worry about the kids that you picked up.”
Children living in the office for a while, what’s next?
Ramirez said three children who were at the CWS office on Thursday were placed in a motel, and taken to Denny’s for dinner after Fresno County’s top administrator Jean Rousseau stepped in to address the children’s office living conditions.
Dosti, with the county, said a county facility at the former University Medical Center near the fairgrounds will be ready Saturday with “bedding, staff, a food service and an onsite pantry” in the event that placements can’t be found for youth.
“We continue to prepare the new CWS location in Clovis which will have several rooms, a kitchen, fresh food, a shower, and laundry facilities,” she said. “That said, the county believes that the UMC and Clovis options are short-term solutions for youth waiting for placement beyond a few hours.”
County officials are scheduled to talk with state representatives early next week to explore longer-term solutions to “easily place youth in more ideal and comfortable environments,” she said.
This story was originally published October 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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