Still in Denial on ACS’s Horrors

Though forced under public pressure to dump Gladys Carríon and install a new chief at the Administration for Children’s Services, Mayor de Blasio remains as clueless as ever about the deadly troubles at ACS.

In formally introducing David Hansell as the troubled agency’s new head Tuesday, de Blasio again denounced as “simplistic” the finding of his own Department of Investigation that ACS suffers “high-level” and “systemic” dysfunction. He even cited the “temptation” some supposedly have to take “something that is unusual and exceptional and try and suggest that’s systemic when I’m sure it’s not systemic.”

By “unusual and exceptional,” he means the growing number of young children who died on de Blasio’s watch despite being put on ACS’s radar.

And that was before the death of 6-yearold Zymere Perkins, bludgeoned to death with a broomstick after five ACS probes.

Yet the real culprit, de Blasio says, isn’t a failing system (no matter what his own investigators found), but individual caseworkers.

That would be funny if it weren’t so tragic: Last December, after a series of Post articles and editorials exposing ACS’s continued failures, de Blasio denounced us for “denigrating the work of all the people at ACS who protect children.”

Now the mayor’s the one scapegoating ACS staffers — even as he still suggests, as he did two months ago, that the whole ACS crisis is nothing more than “fake news.”

As in the early months of the homeless crisis, when he was claiming the bad news was Post-manufactured, de Blasio refuses to accept any failures on his part.

Commissioner Hansell has promised a top-to-bottom review of ACS. Let’s hope he ignores the mayor’s nonsensical hints and starts with a thorough read of those DOI reports.