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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Ind. Courts - Even more on: Marion County juvenile court orders release of the juvenile court file and the much larger DCS case file in TaJanay Bailey case

Updating this ILB entry from Dec. 9th, regarding Marion County juvenile court Judge Marilyn Moores' orders last week for the release of Department of Child Services and Marion County juvenile court records in the TaJanay Bailey's case, and her decision to convene a meeting Monday, Dec. 10th to discuss making critical child protection information directly available to police on the street, Tim Evans of the Indianapolis Star has this encouraging story today headed "Child-alert system will start in days: Police responding to calls will know about DCS cases." Here is the summary from the side-bar:

What's next?

The Department of Child Services will immediately begin compiling information on about 650 children who have recently been reunited with their families or are about to be reunited.

The Department will forward that information to the Marion County Sheriff's Department, where workers will enter the data into the computer system used to dispatch police officers. To complete that within a week, officials expect the workers will be putting in overtime.

Once the system is in place, a police officer headed to an address under DCS scrutiny would see a note to call a caseworker about the incident.

-- Star report

Today's story concludes:
The group at Monday's meeting -- which included representatives from IMPD, the Sheriff's Department, DCS, Indianapolis Mayor-elect Greg Ballard, the court and child advocates -- will meet again in about a week, [Judge] Moores said, to see how to move forward with other short- and long-term initiatives.

"No one in this city who knew about what happened to this little girl went untouched," Moores said.

"The only thing any of us can do is take that energy and make it work for the positive. And I think that's what the people here today are committed to doing."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 11, 2007 06:40 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts