In the Ma’Khia Bryant tragedy, foster care may provide a clue
It feels too soon to write because so much remains unknown. We have shards of what was shattered in Columbus, but pieces are missing, and we don’t even know which, or how many. We have a few seconds of excruciating video from the jouncing camera strapped to a police officer’s uniform. We have a recorded 911 call reporting an assailant with a knife. We have a person in pink appearing to cower against a car, and another person, identified as Ma’Khia, with what appears to be a knife in her hand. We don’t know what’s in her mind, and we’ll never know because she’s dead. But it looks for all the world as if she’s prepared to put that knife into the cowering person in pink.
Of Ma’Khia, we have this shard that feels important, though we don’t know exactly how or where it fits. She was in foster care. Relatives describe her as an affectionate and loving person with hopes of being restored to her mother’s custody. Even so, any path to foster care is traumatic.
It is to the credit of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and the state legislature that improving Ohio’s foster care system has been a priority in recent years. But it has been a priority because foster care in Ohio — like foster care virtually everywhere — falls far short of the needs of its clients.
And while we don’t know the specific needs of this particular child, we know that in 2018, in Franklin County, where Columbus is the seat, nearly 14,000 reports of children in crisis were received. Of those, some 6,000 involved reported physical abuse, more than 2,700 involved neglect, 1,349 involved reported sexual abuse and 1,500 involved multiple offenses. The numbers were rising, according to social workers, as a result of the epidemic of opioid addiction among parents.
That same collection of statistics, courtesy of the Ohio government, tells us that 183 children in Franklin County “aged out” of foster care in 2018. That works out to a new 18-year-old leaving an injured childhood for an unwelcoming future every other day in just this one Ohio county.
Earlier this month, Ohio Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran said of the state’s services for children with complex mental health needs — a group that substantially overlaps with the foster care population — “The current system is at a breaking point.” DeWine’s $1 billion initiative to improve the situation, laudable as it is, will come too late for Ma’Khia.
As little as we know, it’s more than Officer Nicholas Reardon knew when he responded to the 911 call and found the chaotic scene captured by his body cam. People were running, shouting, falling and — in no more time than it takes to read this sentence — a person in pink had run up against a car, and the person who chased her there appeared ready to strike her with a knife.
Basketball genius and social media star LeBron James had seen former officer Derek Chauvin convicted earlier that day of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. When reports of the shooting in Columbus reached him, he rushed to Twitter to post a photograph of Reardon with the caption: “You’re next. #ACCOUNTABILITY.” After learning more, James took down his tweet, but reaffirmed why he had spoken so quickly. “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police,” he wrote.
We know that feeling is real and urgent.
On the other hand, we don’t know what it’s like to be called to a chaotic situation, to be confronted on arrival with what might be a murder in progress, to have a split second to decide what to do, or to realize your decision has ended the life of a child — while possibly saving the life of another. We don’t know how it feels to be the last responder to a child whose needs have been unmet by family and society. To have no time and few options for answering a crisis you did not create.
To be human is to operate from imperfect knowledge. To be wise is to act accordingly. We who speak should do so with care. Not to avoid #ACCOUNTABILITY, but to place it — in each case — where it belongs.
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