Recognizing the connection between family safety and community safety is crucial to protecting children.
In 2021, New York City asked thousands of NYCHA residents how to improve public safety. Some of the needs they articulated: easier access to public benefits, sports and arts programs, healing spaces like community gardens and restorative circles to address trauma, community centers, and peer support and “credible messengers” with the life experience to help others navigate through a challenge.
That same year, parents across the city were asked a different question: How can the city reduce over-reliance on the child welfare system?
Their answers were very similar: to invest in neighborhoods. They wanted investments in grassroots groups, community spaces and programming that offer holistic support.
These responses, reported months apart by the city’s NeighborhoodStat program and by Rise, a parent advocacy group, reflect what decades of research also show: Place matters. Children and families do better — and crime is lower — in places with a strong social fabric, well-kept parks, welcoming libraries and vibrant community organizations.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani understands this logic when it comes to safety. His campaign was built on the premise that over-reliance on law enforcement to manage social problems causes its own harms — and that a community-rooted approach could produce better outcomes. That’s the vision behind the new Office of Community Safety. Now, he has an opportunity and responsibility to apply that same logic to child welfare.
The problem with policing families
For decades, New York City’s primary institutional response to family stress has been to send investigators from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) to a home to determine whether there’s neglect or abuse. If a teacher notices something worrying or a doctor has a concern, their training told them, “when in doubt, call the hotline” — the state-run phone line that takes reports of suspected harm to children. The result is that nearly 1 in 20 New York City families faces a child protective case every year, even though 93% of these cases are not serious enough to lead to further intervention.
Even when children are quickly assessed to be safe, regulations in New York state require multiple visits to the home, interviews with people who know the family, record gathering and extensive documentation. The typical case lasts 40-60 days, while the threat that children may be removed hangs over families.
That knock on the door leaves lasting damage even when it leads nowhere. Research shows that parents who have been investigated pull back from their communities. They confide less in doctors and teachers. They avoid the mental health providers and social services that might actually help them — because those institutions now feel like threats. “We are scared to talk to our doctors or our children’s teachers,” one affected mother wrote, “because we fear they may misinterpret our words and use them against us.” As one mother put it, “Being scared of the child welfare system has an impact on almost everything I do.”
Today, experts agree that, while it’s essential to act swiftly when children are in danger, the child protective system is a blunt instrument deployed too often in situations it was never designed to address. In the past two years, ACS has sought to reduce unnecessary investigations, training more than 25,000 frontline staff in schools, hospitals and shelters that they can “support, not report” a family when a child is not in danger, with promising results.
That’s a good first step, but it’s not enough. The problem is that no city agency holds a charter to ensure that families themselves find a welcoming front door when they need help. ACS — an agency with the power to separate families — can’t offer that friendly hand.
That is why I am part of a coalition of advocates proposing that New York City stand up a new Office of Family Well-Being to commit to building a community approach to family safety, just as it has committed to a community approach to public safety. Ideally, this new office would work in tandem with the Office of Community Safety, and potentially become part of the expanded Department of Community Safety that Mayor Mamdani aims to build. The building blocks of both should be to build up place-based planning and neighborhood supports that stabilize residents, both in everyday life and when setbacks threaten to become crises.
The front-door problem
For 25 years, child welfare advocates and ACS leadership have focused on reducing the most serious trauma of the system — family separation — with significant success. The number of children in foster care fell by 70% between 2001 and 2025, while deaths of children from abuse and neglect also declined. But the rate of investigations — the front door of the system, where families first encounter its power — has barely moved.
These investigations are not distributed equally. Nearly 45% of Black and Latino children in the city can expect to experience an investigation by age 18. And child welfare involvement is hyperconcentrated — and has been for decades — in a small number of neighborhoods. A quarter of all ACS investigations of Black families occur in just nine of the city’s hundreds of zip codes. To a striking degree, these are the same disinvested neighborhoods — Brownsville in Brooklyn and Mott Haven in the Bronx, to name two — where policing is concentrated.
For families, conditions in these neighborhoods increase the potential for stress. In Brownsville, for instance, commute times are long, childcare is scarce and afterschool programs are lacking. Parents told researchers at the Citizens Committee for Children that they avoid local mental health providers because they fear ACS involvement and hesitate to let their kids play outside because of violence. This lack of basic amenities and social infrastructure reflects the legacy of redlining and the results of decades of city disinvestment.
It’s well-established that neighborhood neglect produces crime, and a growing body of research also finds that neighborhood conditions influence child safety and child welfare involvement. For instance, cleaning and greening vacant lots reduces gun violence — and greener neighborhoods also see fewer child welfare reports, even when poverty levels are the same.
Possibly the most important factor is what’s known as collective efficacy — the sense of place and belonging that encourages residents to look after one another and to act in solidarity when necessary. Research reliably finds that neighborhoods with stronger social fabrics have lower rates of crime, substantiated child maltreatment, domestic violence and substance abuse, even when controlling for income and other factors. A Columbia University analysis of New York City found that high rates of collective efficacy are associated with lower rates of substantiated investigations and foster care entries at the zip code level.
With neighborhood conditions tied so tightly to positive public safety and family safety outcomes, a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety that addresses crime while ignoring child welfare is doing half the job. It is critical to fold families into that vision.
The missing office
Over the past year, a collaboration including the Narrowing the Front Door Workgroup, the Innovations Team in the Mayor’s Office of Policy and Planning and two dozen parents and community leaders have developed a detailed proposal for a new Office of Family Well-Being, which could sit within the City’s proposed Department of Community Safety.
The proposed office would perform three interlocking functions. In each neighborhood where child welfare involvement is concentrated, a designated community anchor — a trusted local organization, not a government agency — would lead a planning process to identify the resources families want and need and the local strengths to build on.
The office would then direct grants to community organizations to address priorities surfaced in the planning process. These might include flexible, non-stigmatizing supports that could help families out of bind, such as emergency cash, back-up childcare, peer support, grief counseling and help navigating public benefits, as well as joyful family gatherings and civic actions that bring neighbors together.
At the citywide level, the office would be responsible for identifying citywide gaps and collaborating with local groups to address conditions — like a city warmline for family support — that community collaboratives can’t resolve alone.
ACS itself has been supportive of this planning. “It’s a wonderful idea to have a city entity focused solely on family wellness,” said recent ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser at a City Council hearing in February, adding that he sees “no reason why we shouldn’t urgently kick off a planning process for what an Office of Family Well-Being would look like.”
Direct cost savings for the city
New York City has already demonstrated that upstream child welfare investment pays for itself. A new report published by the NYC Family Policy Project that I co-authored with Tim Ross assembles what city and state taxpayers actually spend on child welfare investigations, and what upstream reforms could save.
We found that, since the state created an uncapped fund for preventive services 25 years ago, sharp reductions in foster care entries have saved billions. If the same number of children were in foster care today as in 2001, New York City alone would be spending $1 billion more annually on foster care costs. That stunning annual savings, with no reduction in safety, is the return on a visionary structural decision made a generation ago.
The next phase of reform could potentially produce a similar return. Each year, New York City spends $142 million responding to hotline calls, an average of about $2,800 per investigation. About 40% of that cost comes from city tax dollars. Eliminating tens of thousands of investigations each year can generate tens of millions of dollars. With the City perennially under pressure to find budget savings, this is the rare reform that will cost less the better it works.
The decision in front of the mayor
The Mayor’s Office of Community Safety is being stood up at this moment, and the mayor continues to envision a full-fledged city department to achieve its mission. The question is whether this vision will expand to include a comprehensive, resourced, independent Office of Family Well-Being — with real authority to shape neighborhood conditions.
When New York went upstream on crime, it proved you can’t just arrest your way out of a safety problem. You also need to invest your way out of it. That’s true for child safety, too. With the synergy of investing in public safety and family well-being together, in the same places, through the same trusted institutions, New York City can have a bigger impact on both.
