Police: How do they decide?

Hope this helps?

I was not a law enforcement officer, Gina, but close to it. I was in management for the state DSS, and we licensed day care homes and 24 hour residential homes and facilities.

We worked closely with DOJ, our State Attorney General and local law enforcement. What frustrated me more and more with my job, and in a way I was thankful they forced me to medically retire, was the politics.

We's have everything we needed to shut down a bad facility, and once it went to the Director and legal in Sacramento, we'd pray it would be approved. the onger I worked there, the more politics came into play, and we were forced to place providers on supervised probation, people that only a few years earlier would have had the license yanked. And the reason we were forced to not shut them down had to do with race, or the possiblity of negative publiicity!

We even were told that we were shutting down too many homes. It became frustrating, because the life of the kids or adults in need of supervised care, was being put at risk! There was one home that right after I retired, was cited and called in for a beat down meeting [meant to scare them into compliance] for having so many citations in a two year period that they were at risk of losing their license. One of those citations was not covering their hot tub properly while children were present.

In 2002, a 2 year old snuck off and fell in the hot tub, nd this was one of those that sat above the ground. The child drwoned, and the day care providers were found to bth be at fault, and high on weed.

This home should've been shut down years earlier, but politics came into play, and a child died. When her arents sued the state for 10 million, they got it right away without a hearing, in an atempt to keep the department from any further negative doings with this case!

I was frustrated with letting bad providers remain in biusiness, but Sacramento and politics had the last word. Which is why I always made a file entry noting that in my best opinion the fcility should have their license revocated.

I contributed to a great book that was written about a group home that saw 3 teens and four adults [trying to save them] drown in an ice covered lake. It was a world swide story in 1991, and the book was written to expose the corrupt behavior of our department! This was another facility I felt needed immediate legal action, but unfortunately the action came a little late for 7 individuals!

If you want to know more about the book, let me know. I didn't write it, I was just a contributor to the author who needed my input to write what was missing from the actual files surrounding the case!

Hope this helps! I know I was always disappointed in my agency, because one way or another, politics reared its ugly head!