A legal battle over child abuse hotline data requested four years ago by The Colorado Sun and 9News has reached the Colorado Supreme Court.
The case centers on the news organizations’ joint request under the Colorado Open Records Act for the number of calls made to the state child abuse hotline from three child residential treatment centers in the Denver area from 2018 to 2021.
Journalists sought the information while investigating the safety of children in residential centers, including the death of a 12-year-old boy who ran away from Tennyson Center and was struck and killed by a vehicle.
The Colorado Department of Human Services denied that request in 2021, saying that providing the number of calls to the hotline per residential center was a violation of privacy for the children living at the three centers. At the time, the centers — Cleo Wallace, Tennyson Center for Children and Mount Saint Vincent — were state-licensed residential centers.
The records request did not ask for children’s names or details of the reports to the hotline. It asked for the number of calls made during those three years from each center and the number of calls that were investigated.
The homes are places of last resort for foster youth who’ve been through multiple placements and for kids who have such severe mental health issues that they’re not safe living with their parents.
In arguments before the seven justices of the state Supreme Court on Monday, the child welfare department’s lawyer said that if investigative journalists knew the number of hotline calls made from a specific address, they could use that information to identify a child who was abused.
Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Carty referenced a 2021 Colorado Sun article that mentioned a juvenile at Tennyson who broke into a medicine cabinet and overdosed on medication, ending up in a hospital for four days. The details came from a report from the state Office of the Child Protection Ombudsman.
“You know, because he’s living in the Tennyson Center, that he has mental health or emotional issues,” Carty said. “The address played a role in that, and that’s a lot of information. I still don’t know who that child is. I think an investigative reporter worth their salt would potentially figure out who that child is if they don’t know who it is already.
“There is a need to protect these children, and the government doesn’t necessarily know what other information a particular requester has.”
But Michael Beylkin, the attorney for the Colorado Sun and 9News, argued that it was impossible to figure out a child’s identity with only an aggregate number — a tally of total calls to the hotline that likely is hundreds of calls per year. The point of the request, he said, was to help determine whether specific residential treatment centers are doing their best to protect vulnerable children.
It would be different if the news agencies were requesting a child’s home address, or even requesting the number of calls from a residential treatment center on a single day, he said.
The laws governing public records and the privacy of children are intended to provide balance that “allows the public to supervise the functioning of government, and in particular here, the facilities that are supposed to be keeping these children safe, and the critical privacy interest,” Beylkin said. “We don’t dispute that the privacy interests of the children, the families and the informants are paramount.”
Some of the justices kept coming back to the same question: How would the aggregate data identify children?
“Let’s say 12 calls went, who does that identify?” Justice Melissa Hart asked.
The open records request did not ask for an address, only numbers of calls, said Justice Carlos A. Samour, Jr.
“We already know the address is here, right?” he asked the state’s attorney. “I feel like it almost feels like that routine from Abbott and Costello. You know, ‘Who’s on first?’ They’re asking for a number … They’re just asking how many reports have been made. I still don’t get the argument.”
The news outlets were able to obtain police data, however, for their investigative series about the growing problem of children running away from residential treatment centers.
The Denver Police Department was called to Tennyson Center for Children 357 times in 2020. Denver police were called to Mount Saint Vincent treatment center, also in the northwest part of the city, about twice per week on average in 2019 and 2020.
In 2019, The Colorado Sun reported that a Pueblo County residential center for children was the subject of 243 reports of suspected abuse or neglect in the year before it was shut down by the state. The data came from a Child Protection Ombudsman report, which argued that the state’s delay in action against the El Pueblo Boys & Girls Ranch allowed children and teens to suffer repeated abuse, often committed by staff members who had faced previous accusations.
The Colorado Court of Appeals previously sided with The Colorado Sun and 9News, and the case then went to the state Supreme Court. The justices will rule on the matter at a future date.