Alameda County caseworkers routinely fail to respond to referrals of child abuse and neglect with the urgency legally required, a new analysis shows, suggesting systemic deficiencies behind the county’s apparent failure to protect an abused 8-year-old from Hayward who died earlier this year in her mother’s care.

Data from the California Child Welfare Indicators Project — a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the California Department of Social Services — reveals that Alameda County lags behind nearly every county in California in responding to reports of abuse and neglect within the legally required time frame, placing hundreds of vulnerable children there at further risk of danger. In addition, an unusually large number of complaints are deemed to need no response at all.

The findings come in the wake of a Bay Area News Group investigation published in June about a child abuse case that culminated in the death of 8-year-old Sophia Mason of Hayward. The investigation revealed that seven separate abuse complaints were made to Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services during the final 15 months of her life, but caseworkers repeatedly determined she was safe, often without even attempting to make an in-person evaluation.

“There’s a reason why we have these set time frames, and it’s to protect the safety of children,” said Nicol Stolar-Peterson, a licensed clinical social worker and child abuse expert. “When you have somebody who is causing harm to children and there is no intervention to stop them, they’re essentially left unchecked and there’s nothing keeping them from causing more harm.”

Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi, DCFS director Michelle Love and spokesperson Sylvia Soublet did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

State law requires that when child welfare complaints match the state’s definition of abuse or neglect, a caseworker must conduct an in-person investigation within 10 calendar days or, in the most severe cases, immediately.

During the first four months of 2022, 316 complaints of child abuse or neglect were not handled within the required 10-day time frame — the equivalent of 51.5% of such cases. That is nearly four times higher than the statewide average of 13.8% and the worst of any county in the state besides Tulare.

By comparison, 21 children in Contra Costa County were not visited in the required 10-day time frame — a figure that represents just 2.7% of the county’s cases.

In the most critical cases, which require an investigation within 24 hours, caseworkers in Alameda County missed their targets during that same time frame at twice the average rate statewide — failing to respond swiftly to reports of abuse or neglect involving 64 children, or 13.5% of cases, compared to 6.1% across California.

Christopher Keane, a San Francisco-based child abuse attorney, said that delaying an investigation even a day could make a significant difference in a child’s life.

“Bad things don’t happen in every case, but when they do — and they could have been prevented — that’s when the failures of the system are consequential,” he said. “The kids are too important to let that go to chance.”

An investigation loses effectiveness as time passes between when a report is made and when a caseworker is sent to evaluate a situation, Keane said. Delayed investigations could provide an abusive parent or guardian with more time to coax children into changing their stories; the time lapse could also mean that visible signs of abuse, such as bruises, fade or disappear before a caseworker’s visit.

“Time matters — and it could matter irreversibly for some kids,” Keane said.

The data shows that Alameda County caseworkers also choose not to investigate large numbers of complaints, a finding that drew additional criticism from some outside observers.

More than 5,500 complaints of child abuse and neglect made in 2021 to Alameda County DCFS — about half of the total — were “evaluated out,” meaning they were never investigated and caseworkers chose not to conduct an in-person evaluation. The county’s rate of 50% is about double the statewide average of 28%.

In Sophia’s case, five of the seven reports of abuse and neglect made in the span of just 10 months were evaluated out. In some of those instances, family members have claimed that they told caseworkers Sophia was showing visible bruising and admitted to being hurt by her mother and mother’s boyfriend.

“I think it sends a message to abusive parents or guardians that they can abuse their children with impunity, and no one is coming to look into it, to check on them or to rescue their kids,” said Carly Sanchez, an attorney representing Sophia’s family. “And what is particularly disturbing is that Sophia’s case is an example of exactly what can happen if you choose to ignore legitimate referrals of abuse or neglect, which is that a child can end up dead.”

In late June, two Alameda County supervisors — Nate Miley and David Haubert — vowed to investigate the handling of Sophia’s child welfare case. As of mid-August, neither had released any information publicly nor called for any formal audit of her case or DCFS policies and practices.

When contacted on Thursday, Haubert said he was not aware of the latest statistics regarding the department’s response times but once again said he was “looking into it internally.”

“We are all concerned for the welfare of our children,” he added.

It is not clear why Alameda County has fallen so far behind most California counties in responding to and investigating reports of child abuse and neglect. However, emails obtained by this news organization provide some insight.

In a DCFS-wide email on June 10, Brittany Walker Pettigrew, director of the DCFS prevention and intake services division, said the agency was facing “some challenging times,” and she implored at least a half-dozen employees to temporarily vacate their posts in other areas of the agency to help investigate abuse and neglect reports in the Emergency Response Unit.

But by early August — just two months after the initial email — it appeared little progress had been made in solving the agency’s staffing shortages.

Walker Pettigrew sent another agency-wide email on Aug. 9 thanking those who volunteered to help with investigations but announced that the agency was “in need of additional support.”

An Alameda County DCFS employee who spoke to the Bay Area News Group anonymously said the agency lost a lot of emergency response employees during the COVID-19 pandemic because people didn’t want to go out to investigate and risk getting infected.

“I think for a lot of people, they just don’t want to go out anymore,” said the employee, who is not authorized to speak to the media. “And when you don’t have the bodies, things just get pushed to the back, pushed to the back, pushed to the back.”