There’s an App for That?

How it developed

To backtrack a bit, how did this all come together?

Dekmar, Glick, and Persley were members of an ad hoc committee the GACP created in early 2024 to address the state’s child mortality crisis. Glick worked with other committee members to create specialized trainings so that officers can identify obvious and subtle signs of risk.

The group also recommended that police departments use a shareable database, allowing officers on the ground to directly notify all of the participating agencies about children who may need services. The standardized instrument Glick designed, the CARE (Child At Risk Evaluation) assessment tool, provides officers with a field-ready, trauma-informed approach to evaluating a child’s risk. He developed it with input from law enforcement practitioners so that it can be administered easily in patrol settings using an app created for this purpose.

The utility company Georgia Power provided a $250,000 grant to fund the Albany pilot. Dekmar says the city was selected in part because of the high child mortality rates in Dougherty County – and under the leadership of Persley, the police department stepped up. Dekmar says, “We call it the Albany model – they did an absolutely wonderful job. They brought in all the partners.”

The key puzzle that the app has helped solve is how to get crucial information about children at risk to relevant community organizations and responders as quickly as possible, so that necessary services can wrap around the child almost immediately. With the app, it takes six minutes on average for officers to complete the CARE form, allowing them to send information about a child at risk to their investigation department, local and state child protective agencies, the school support network, and child advocacy centers.

How it’s working

The results so far are encouraging. Dekmar rattles off a few of them: While the national average is 42 days from the time a child is reported to a child protective agency until services are initiated, with the app, “we’re finding that some kids were getting wraparound services in 12 hours. Advocacy services – wraparound services from the child advocacy centers, child protective agencies, and schools – increased 14 percent. Schools’ notifications from law enforcement about reports of children potentially at risk increased 600 percent.”

The results suggest other dramatic improvements for children, including a 10 percent decrease in domestic violence cases involving children and a 27 percent decrease in children experiencing physical or sexual assault within a year.

The pilot was so well received by local law enforcement that Dekmar says it has been expanded to cover about 350,000 people in six counties. Statewide, about 46 counties have reached out and expressed interest.

Dekmar believes that part of the initiative’s success comes from giving officers a clear set of steps to follow, so they can share the right information with the right people as soon as possible.

And after one year, a study of children attending Albany public schools suggests that, as Dekmar and his coauthors wrote in their article last fall, “students subject to a CARE report are 678 percent more likely to receive a social work referral in school. Children requiring forensic interventions from [child advocacy centers] receive on average 14 percent more service per incident. . . [and there has been] a significant drop in children experiencing sexual, physical, and domestic violence related crimes.” They concluded, “While it is still early, these results – and others in pilot areas including Carroll and Haralson counties – indicate this must become a statewide initiative in order to protect children and ensure they don’t fall through the cracks.”

As for project costs, Dekmar estimates that the work in Albany, which has about 80,000 people, cost roughly $49,000.

The authors also stressed that from 2012 to 2022, “the preventable deaths of children in Georgia from maltreatment and unsafe sleep practices cost the state between $3.2 and $41.2 billion, depending on the valuation method. This figure does not include the costs associated with long-term trauma, loss of educational attainment, workforce productivity, or health disparities.” And according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 2019, “98.4 percent of all child homicides in the state” were preventable. Based on the results from Albany, Glick calculated that if 86 percent of those deaths had been prevented, 2,286 more children would still be alive.

How central is the app to these results? Dekmar says the initiative doesn’t require it, “but the agencies using the app are tethered to it.” Even if officers and service providers are not on call 24 hours a day, “When they get up in the morning, there’s that alert – and folks start contacting who they need to in order to provide services to those children.”

The app improves integrated interagency communication with real-time notifications. It also creates accountability, as Dekmar notes, because the notifications not only go to the child advocacy center and the school, but in the police department. “They go to the head of investigations, a deputy chief, and the detective who’s in charge of the unit for special victims. The next morning they’re asking, ‘OK, where are we at on this case?’ What we found in looking at the homicides is that everybody had a little piece of the puzzle, but nobody had the full picture.”

According to Dekmar, the trainings have also helped build a foundation and mutual understanding that can help people put those pieces together. “The training is three hours and all those disciplines are there: The schools are there, law enforcement is there, and so are the CACs [child advocacy centers]. They started building a rapport and contacts that resulted in kind of a hand-in-glove relationship as it relates to providing services for these folks.”

What’s next?

Dekmar is optimistic about the ability of the app – and the collaborations it has prompted – to change the trajectory for at-risk children across the state. As other agencies adopt this approach, he says more opportunities arise for law enforcement to support children and families. The potential to help with school safety in particular is gaining traction.

He notes that the initiative included a survey of school personnel: “We indicated that we might stop it entirely and asked how disappointed they would be if it were terminated: They said 10+ out of 10. A few months later we asked if they would be interested in expanding this to incorporate threat assessments related to pupils. All of them said yes – and we will be launching pilots for all of them.”