https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/02/16/prosecutors-legal-guardians-pulled-10-year-old-out-school-despite-teacher-opposition/
In this case a foster child was murdered slowly starved to death and the school, the neighborhood parents, and her biological parents where all calling and asking DHS to do a safety check.
Why are the state employees who refused to check on her not being charged with any crime? Also their names have not been released.
She was literally never checked on once she was put into foster care.
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Generally speaking, we seem to go easy on public servants when they screw up because the incentives that cause them to work hard are diminished when compared to their private sector counterparts, and the benefits of their hard work don’t go to them as much as they go to society.
If a cop is going to be sued for failing to effectively rescue a person, he might not get out of his car to help in the first place. If he does save that person, he might get recognized for his hard work, but not in the same monetary way as, say, a real estate attorney might be. And by the same token, our society is benefited tremendously when someone isn’t murdered.
So, we worry that is we make the workers too vulnerable to their failures, they will simply not do the work by leaving our by doing nothing at all.
In your example, the DHS employee might prefer to not take notes of their encounters with the kid’s family. No paper trail, no risk of being punished if the kid dies. Or, at an even higher level, why create an apparatus to protect kids in the first place if all it is going to do is expose the government to liability?
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