St. Joseph County Prosecutor Ken Cotter says he hopes adults won’t receive less protection from abuse and neglect once the state privatizes Adult Protective Services starting a week from today. But he says there will be fewer investigators.
Since 1985 Indiana had contracted with county prosecutors to oversee Adult Protective Services, broken down into 17 groups of counties. Cotter’s group had seven investigators for four counties, compared to 11 investigators over 20 counties starting July 1.
Instead of elected prosecutors the state will contract with Boston-based for-profit company, Public Consulting Group.
Cotter says the company has offered jobs to four of his seven investigators but he didn’t know how many have accepted the offers.
Under the new model, investigators will take a social service approach, making sure adults can take care of themselves. If they believe someone has criminally victimized an adult, perhaps improperly taking their money while caring for them, for example, APS investigators will refer cases to law enforcement instead of investigating themselves.
“Somebody who is of sound mind, they can decide to give away all their money if they want to,” Cotter says. “Somebody who is starting to go through the beginnings of dementia, maybe not so much. Trying to make those determinations is never easy. So now there’s the separation between the two. It may make it more difficult. I hope not.
“Here I think that our investigators were very dedicated. They did a very good job. Worked well with law enforcement when law enforcement needed to get involved because a lot of times it’s not as cut and dried.”
Cotter says the change isn’t a huge surprise because the state has “woefully” underfunded APS for years.
“I think there were four different studies that were conducted that all said the same thing, that this is underfunded,” he says. “We were blessed enough here in St. Joseph County that our council supplemented the pay for APS so we didn’t lose investigators but I know of a number of others hubs that they were threadbare because their counties weren’t able to supplement the pay and they had to reduce the number of workers.”
At Tuesday night’s council meeting he’ll ask permission to pay his APS staff a few thousand dollars of severance pay for unused paid time off, as a sort of thank you for their dedication.
“I thought that having them cut off mid-year was hard on them and I think that’s frankly a ‘thank you’ for the work that they had done.”
