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Opinion: Judi Atwood--CPS failure to Protect Children in the State of Colorado

in 2019 CPS in Colorado noticed that several reports of Child Abuse went ignored due to a computer glitch.
Typewriter opinion
Photo by Alexa Mazzarello on Unsplash

This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Dear Editor,

in 2019 CPS in Colorado noticed that several reports of Child Abuse went ignored due to a computer glitch. The State of Colorado paid 25.3 million for a computer upgrade that left children at risk. “Our workers rely on that system to look at the prior history of a family,” Makelky said. “And if the system goes down, they’re flying blind in terms of making critical decisions about a child’s safety.” I am wondering if the system is really fixed am I am not talking about computers. I am talking about the police, CPS and the Family Courts whom are clearly not on the same system.

CPS has one system they investigate and if they decide that a child is in no immediate danger than the child remains in the home. How many stories do we have to read pertaining to children dying in the homes that CPS had investigated or called to investigate that was deemed safe by CPS only months later we have to endure and read that the child is found murdered by his or her own caregiver. How many more have to die before the system stops punishing protective parents?

Parents have to endure the uninformed Family Courts the computer glitches of CPS and State Laws that fail to protect children from dying in the hands of the caregivers that are suppose to protect them and when we ask for help we are loosing custody.

I can only hope with the horrific pandemic that the State begins to value it's own children by making regulations to protect and to oversee CPS calls to homes of concern. I hope for stricter laws pertaining to the ethics of Family Law Attorneys and also training of Family Court Judges and clearly a much improved value placed on kind loving parents whom until recently have been ridiculed by family court judges for protecting their own children.

Netflix's has recently made available for viewing "The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez" a true story of the current CPS and State system and how its failing to protect. Also here in Colorado we are failing children we are failing to protect yet we ask our children to remain in the homes of the abusers during the Covid19 crisis. Just as abusers know the system they also know that during a pandemic they can do whatever they want and the State hasn't caught up to that mindset yet - unfortunately. For more information on the situation in Colorado here is link to a story on the crisis currently in Colorado https://coloradosun.com/2020/02/27/colorado-child-abuse-and-neglect-fatalities/
Sincerely,
Judi-Beth Atwood
Longmont CO

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