We Need an Outstanding Leader at DSS

Social Worker Should Not Be in Charge

Terrorist Attack Was a Warning to Women

October 2001

When State Police troopers burst into the maternity ward of a hospital last month to help social workers seize a day-old baby from the arms of its mother, all of us were brutally damaged.

But it took the Wall Street Journal to tell us so. They had a headline on Monday, “Another Massachusetts Outrage.” They described the incident as “chilling.”

But no one in Massachusetts appears to be aware that anything has even happened.

To make it worse, the person in charge at DSS, Jeffrey Locke, was praised and lauded at a hearing before the Governor’s Council last month after Gov. Swift had appointed him as a judge on our Superior Court.

Now that he is a judge, he will be ruling on important cases such as this, affecting our fundamental liberties.

We Need an Outsider for Commissioner

It’s crucial that we get a law-abiding outsider to head up DSS. The new person must not be a social worker or someone else who is a part of the system. It should be an outsider who brings reform and integrity to this Department.

We do not have a General running our Defense Department. We should not have a social worker running DSS.

It must be someone who understands that our law holds that one of the most important tenets of our society is that a child is raised by his or her parents. Only when a child is abused can the state go to a judge and seek to remove the child.

And the state can never take a child without the prior approval of a judge unless it is an extreme emergency.

How could Jeffrey Locke believe this was an extreme emergency? His DSS had plotted for months to remove the child as soon as it was born. Why didn’t he go to a judge before seizing the child as is required by law? Why wasn’t the mother allowed to come before a judge and argue for her rights and that of the child?

They didn’t do that because DSS knew that they would lose if they did.

And they also know that the judges of Massachusetts always allow them to break the law with impunity. So why should they bother to follow the law?

It may also be a factor that the mother in this case had sued Locke and he was getting even with her.

Why wasn’t he asked any of this by anyone at his hearing?

It will sound trite but DSS operates as they do in Cuba or China, but we live in a place where we have Harvard Law School, the Boston Bar Association and all the other bastions of liberty for which we are famous.

Does your child have to be taken before we realize that all of us are under attack when we have lost the rule of law?

Only Nev Moore Challenged It

The only person who challenged the appointment of Jeffrey Locke to be a judge in the Superior Court was Nev Moore, President of Justice for Families and an activist for children and parents who have been damaged by DSS.

Moore held the room spellbound as she calmly made her case in opposition to Locke’s nomination as a judge in the Superior Court. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair during her presentation. “I would not trust him to judge a pie contest,” she said.

She suggested that the Governor’s Council speak with other legislators, especially with the members of the Committee on Human Services and Elderly Affairs, who she said have expressed their surprise and concern that Locke does not address allegations and serious concerns about DSS that are raised in committee meetings.

She said that legislators tell her that ever since Locke took over DSS, the commissioner’s office became “locked up tight and incommunicado,” and operates under a “siege mentality.”

“It’s absolutely unforgivable because it’s a taxpayer funded agency and he needs to remember who is writing his paycheck,” said Moore. “We’re not talking about an organization that builds roads and bridges as it should, we’re talking about an organization that can destroy a family for life.”

We Can Do Better for Our Children

We must let Gov. Swift know that we expect someone who is highly independent to run this agency which is so out of control.

Let’s hope that Gov. Swift will do better by us on her appointment and tap someone who is truly independent of the social worker clique which dominates that agency.

We must really think about the children this time.