Originally published at: Indy animal shelter fires staff who background-checked adopters
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Indianapolis Animal Care Services fires workers who checked whether adopters had cruelty convictions
12 Likes
Unless that system tosses out a large number of false positives, WTF?
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Essentially advertising to animal cruelty enthusiasts: take these animals, we don’t care.
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Well…it might. I mean, our criminal justice system we know is biased against POC, and especially against black people. And POC are commonly overcharged. So it’s possible this rules change had good intent behind it.
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Criminal record checks should be basic due dilligence, but they only started doing them after a dog was hanged, only two years ago.
It sounds as if they knew perfectly well who the adopters were and also knew that they needed not to know on an official level.
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I don’t know why everyone is immediately assuming this isn’t sincere. I think it sounds entirely likely. Again, our criminal justice system is biased. We all know this. I’m not saying they should have done away with background checks completely, but I am saying that I think it’s possible their intent in doing so was good. Maybe they looked at who had been failing the background checks and saw that a disproportionate number were POC. If so, they should say that. They should have said it to begin with. And if it’s not true, and this is just a smoke screen, then fuck em. But some transparency would go a long way here.
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I think you have just answered your own question.
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It wouldn’t surprise me if the person who revoked the policy is profiting somehow from illegal dog fighting.
Also, no prizes for guessing the party affiliation of the people who revoked the policy.
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Two years ago when we tried to adopt a cat in Boston, the local shelter wanted to look over veterinary reports from previous pets (we had none), inspect our apartment to make sure it was a good environment, then do a follow-up visit after adoption to make sure everything was on the up and up.
If you didn’t have a pet previously, that was a little dubious to them. And if you were awkward during the on site encounter at the shelter, apparently the vibe was too off and your application would be rejected. So, I think shelters can be too protective.
That said…
The article here seems to indicate checking for prior convictions for animal cruelty specifically. Which makes sense when screening pet adopters.
If it was just checking generally criminal behavior, maybe that’s going too far (possibly taking care of a pet could make someone more compassionate). But if a person has already proven to a court they will harm an animal specifically, not sure that is a great match.
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The thing is that all legal tests could lead to biased and inequitable outcomes. So in the absense of transparency and the presence of “cheap dogs, free rope” its sincerity is in question.
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If the shelter workers were conducting background checks on the sly—i.e., with no transparency at all—then it seems entirely likely that those workers could have been disproportionately investigating People of Color. So even if the justice system was colorblind (which it obviously isn’t) the shelter workers might not be.
The solution is to have clear and transparent guidelines applied equally to all potential adoptees.
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This is the kind of solution that comes up from MBA-having leadership pushing metrics. I’m sure they set some kind of a # of animal adopted / day kind of thing.
This is why I advise pretty much anyone to falsify as much data as they can in all directions where metrics are tied to performance. Spreading FUD helps defeat these kinds of initiatives much better than logic’ing your way through them. Lying in the positive is planned for. Just dumping a fire of data into the measurements to ruin them is the better path.
And as an Indianapolis resident, I’d guess this will result in yet another reorg for IACS.
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In other news, this asshole is moving to Indianapolis.
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Jesus fucking christ. 
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our criminal justice system we know is biased against POC, and especially against black people. And POC are commonly overcharged.
While I agree that any system can (a does) have biases, I think it’s a leap to claim that background checks shouldn’t be used at all. That seems like the proverbial “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
In my experience working with pet adoption centers, the animal control folks are the least “Hardcore” of any law enforcement I’ve ever met. They simply want to help the animals. And it’s often a heartbreaking job.
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I never said they shouldn’t be used at all. I’m not even justifying the decision. All I’m saying is that they may have had good intentions.
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I realize that there are many ways of getting around pesky procedural issues, even in jurisdictions where they exist, when firing people; but it seems particularly bold to fire people for not following a policy that both contradicts the old policy and apparently never existed in writing; and actually give that as the reason for the firing.
Quietly dropping a step that reduces the pool of eligible adopters and then doing a purely ‘performance based’ cull of the people whose numbers suggest that they aren’t being team players about cutting corners, sure, that would be deeply unsurprising; but this seems like a weird move.
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I think the bit of the statement that seems really tone deaf in context is “we would never knowingly place an animal in a potentially dangerous situation”; in response to firing a couple of people for crimes against the see-no-evil policy; especially the one who started back up in response to a case of a dog that was adopted out, confiscated from the adopter over cruelty or abandonment, then re-adopted to the same party.
I assume that animal shelters don’t have the sort of KYC compliance obligations that the financial services guys earned themselves by being a little too customer-centric in their approach; but in this case one can see the appeal of the idea.
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Time for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit-if the policy was never in writing, and it contradicted the one that was in writing, then the employees were following the policy that would be binding. Whatever the intentions of the people who tried to change the policy, they went about it from the wrong end. If they were concerned about the policy unfairly rejecting POC, then bringing that up to change how the checks were rated would have been a better move. It would have both highlighted the imbalance of who is getting rejected and brought to light the way the shelter was willing to give animals to people with a criminal history of animal abuse.
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The timeline roughly lines up with the change in leadership(for some reason the head of ACS is a ‘deputy director’, I think that’s because the organization is under another agency): the prior one resigned effective February 2nd; which is reflected in the change in board minutes between January (Katie Trennepohl), February (Kelly Diamond, interim Deputy Director); and March (Kelly Diamond, not-interim Deputy Director).
The May Minutes do specifically note:
“Background checks have been removed as part of the adoption process to align with best practices of other shelters around the country.”
They also note:
Staffing Updates (Kelly Diamond)
• 1 Adoptions Coordinator vacancy
• 1 Full-Time Adoption Counselor vacancy
• 4 Full-Time Senior Animal Care Tech vacancies
• 3 Part-Time Senior Animal Care Tech vacancies
• 1 Vet Assistant II vacancy
• 3 Animal Control Officer vacancies
• 1 Part-Time Customer Relations Officer vacancy
• 1 Indy CARES Coordinator vacancy
• 1 Indy CARES Specialist vacancy
and there are a couple of public comments:
Sydney Clemens: What is being done to boost morale in staff and volunteers?
Kelly Diamond we would love to know how to open communication more with
staff. We are listening and hearing the issues around the shelter. We would love
to know how to do things differently.
Lauren Wyatt: I wanted to offer a different viewpoint about discontinuing use of MyCase
to check adopters. One of the biggest examples that is brought up is about Deron who
was adopted from the shelter to an individual that had strangulation and battery listed.
Volunteers are afraid of a dog going into a home with someone who has neglect or abuse
charges involving dependents. Lauren read an excerpt from an article published by the
FBI about the dynamic of domestic animals, domestic violence victims and the
perpetrators. We do not allow individuals to volunteer if they have battery charges or
neglect of a dependent but we will adopt animals to them.
News reports about the prior director’s resignation make it sound like it wasn’t necessarily brimming with organizational good cheer over the years(not necessarily a huge surprise; being a jurisdiction’s must-accept shelter is probably a pretty grim job at times); not sure if the transition was particularly difficult or if it occurred because the prior director couldn’t take it anymore and resigned.
I can find very little about the new director; aside from one entry for someone who puts their title as “Administrator of Policy & Planning” but appears to be the only Kelly Diamond working for Indianapolis Animal Care Services. If that’s the right person it’s certainly not a puppy-kicking CV; years of professional and volunteer animal welfare stuff that you wouldn’t really do for the fat stacks or the chance to burnish your credentials for a campaign for a republican governorship.
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