The “home” where Jahmeik Modlin and his three siblings were “raised” was by all accounts a torture chamber. Jahmeik was 4-years-old and a ghastly 19 pounds when he was found dead inside the Harlem apartment. His siblings, ages 5, 6 and 7, were also so severely malnourished they can only now receive IV fluids. If you’re not feeling sick and furious yet, you should be. The little boy’s mother and father, who unpersuasively claim he must have lost weight recently due to an illness, by all available evidence were starving their own flesh and blood to the bone. There must be consequences, which is why it’s right and proper that the two “caregivers” have been charged with manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child, and why it’s right and proper that their living children are now in government custody. The consequences must not end there. New York City spends some $3 billion a year funding the Administration for Children’s Services, an agency that employs more than 1,300 investigative caseworkers. Caseloads per worker have come way down from 27 around the time of the notorious 1995 death of Elisa Izquierdo to 8.1 presently.  Which is to say: Following up on reports of abuse or neglect and determining when and whether to take the drastic step of pressing for a child to be removed from his or her parents or other caregivers remains an inherently difficult job, but no longer should the city roll its eyes at the suggesting that dysfunction is the inevitable outcome given a chronically overwhelmed and underfunded agency. In Jahmeik’s case, his killing especially stings because ACS had previously investigated claims that the boy was malnourished and determined the complaint to be unsubstantiated. But that’s all we know about that, because the city, citing privacy rules, typically reveals almost no details of what went wrong. A boy is dead, three other young lives are forever traumatized and an agency is under legitimate scrutiny. The public has a right and responsibility to know much more. Yes, by law New York State requires a review by the state’s Office of Children and Family Services when child deaths result from abuse or maltreatment. Summaries of those investigations are made available to the public. They’re not nearly detailed enough to understand all the failures that must be fixed, all the gaps that must be plugged. A data table in the ACS “Systemic Child Fatality Review: 2022 Annual Report” — the latest such report available online — catalogs the number of child deaths by cause in families known to ACS over the previous decade. These are the annual homicide numbers since 2013: 6, 9, 10, 11, 6, 10, 10, 5, 10, 9. That’s 86 dead children.  We don’t know what the “right” number of dead children is in a city with more than 8 million people, where more than 40,000 abuse and neglect complaints come in annually, but it’s got to be smaller than that. No, no one should want the government to engage in overzealous removals of children in cases where mom and dad are merely living in poverty. The United States and New York have seen too many families torn apart for insufficient cause over the years, resulting in a corrective pendulum swing to prioritize family preservation. But when does the pendulum swing back? When does New York decisively learn from states like New Jersey, where a court-imposed monitor has implemented systemic reform, most of it preventive, that’s saving children’s lives? When do we have a Vision Zero not only for traffic deaths but for children gasping their last breaths in their own homes?