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Hawaii is on the verge of significantly changing the legal process for taking children from their parents when they’re accused of abuse or neglect. The idea is to assure that the crucial and often traumatic step is reviewed more often by a judge.

It’s refreshing to see state officials address what has clearly been a questionable legal process with a great potential for harming families. But it will take some time to see if this new approach works.

The vehicle is two almost identical measures, Senate Bill 2245 and House Bill 2428. Both bills were approved by their respective chambers Tuesday and are now crossing over to the other.

As I have written repeatedly, Hawaii is an outlier among Western states in almost never getting judges to approve taking children from their parents when it suspects abuse or neglect. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decisions govern in Hawaii, has said judicial review of a child removal is required unless there’s reasonable cause to believe a child will be seriously injured before that can happen and there’s no reasonable alternative.

This matters, for several reasons.

First, state social workers whose mission is to protect children are less likely to weigh the constitutional rights of parents than a judge would be. And parents and children do have rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution that must be balanced against the danger to the child.

But there’s another, practical reason. Pulling more children than necessary into the foster system overloads it. With too many foster children to monitor and not enough social workers, shocking abuse cases can be missed.

So what would these bills do?

For one thing, they would get rid of an absurd provision of Hawaii law, so nonsensical it that must have been a mistake. It defines “imminent harm” as the possibility that a child will be injured in the next 90 days. Compare that to other states that define imminent harm as potential danger in the next few hours.

“That standard may result in children being removed from their homes without a court order more often than is necessary,” the Department of Human Services, the parent agency of Child Welfare Services, wrote in testimony for one of the bills.

As it stands now, police can remove a child if they believe the danger to the child is “exigent” — about to happen, in other words. That does occur. But often, the state’s Child Welfare Services decides that it wants to take a child from the parents and gets the police to do it, since they’re the only ones with the legal authority to do so without a court order.

There’s another route not involving the police. CWS can go to a Family Court judge and petition for foster custody. But CWS hardly ever does it that way — only about 7% of the time in one recent year.

CWS said it almost always removes children through police protective custody because it takes too long to get a court order. Instead, once a child has been taken, it petitions the Family Court for an after-the-fact approval within three days, followed by a hearing in the following two days.

The two bills purport to address this dilemma. They would still allow police to act on the spur of the moment if the danger is “exigent” — something bad is about to happen. But if the situation posed the risk of “imminent harm” — dangerous, but stable enough to avoid immediate removal by police — CWS would have a new, faster pathway to get a court order.

CWS’s parent agency, the Department of Human Services, would file a petition and motion for immediate protective custody without notice or a hearing, and without the need to have the parents present.

If the judge finds that the department has “reasonable cause to believe” that the child is subject to imminent harm, he or she issues a written order for the police to take the child into protective custody. The police are supposed to make “every reasonable effort” to serve the parents with the order.

The “reasonable cause” test, which is a legal term of art, has been cited in 9th Circuit opinions on child removals.

This all sounds very technical and dry, but it is at the heart of the government’s response to child abuse and neglect allegations. On the one hand, this process has the potential to unnecessarily rip apart families. On the other, it can fail to adequately protect vulnerable children. It’s very important to get the balance right.

In other states, setting up a process allowing judicial review appears to have reduced the number of children entering the foster system. Arizona, for instance, provided me with statistics showing a reduction even before the law went into effect, while it was still just an idea.

It might seem to to make sense that the best way to protect children, when there’s even a suspicion of abuse or neglect, is to remove them right away.

But the state has to find safe homes for all those children, and then monitor them to make sure their new homes aren’t as bad as or worse than where they came from.

We don’t yet know all the facts behind the January death of Geanna Bradley, a 10-year-old Wahiawa girl whose legal guardians are accused of starving and abusing her. But it seems very likely that the girl first came to that house of horrors as a foster child. Likewise, a 4-year-old boy who had been adopted by Geanna’s legal guardians, Thomas and Brandy Blas, who was also horribly abused, may have been placed there as a foster child.

Geanna’s case was eerily reminiscent of 6-year-old Ariel Sellers, the Waimanalo girl whose disappearance two-and-a-half years ago set off a frantic search that culminated in her adoptive parents being charged with starving and abusing her to death. Ariel, whose name was changed to Isabella Kalua, was first placed there as a foster child.

Nearly 1,000 children a year in Hawaii are taken into police protective custody. Reducing that number might free up CWS social workers to spend more time monitoring each child in the foster system.

That’s a practical reason, but there’s also a matter of principle — parents have constitutional rights, and being accused of child abuse does not nullify them. In addition, much research has shown that removing a child for even a day can have lasting psychological consequences.

“The oversight and input of the Family Court judges in the removal process would better protect the rights of the families involved while still providing for the safety of children,” the Hawaii Attorney General’s office said in written testimony on one of the bills.

And this from the state Judiciary: “This bill appears to adequately balance the need for immediate police action to protect a child from serious harm and the need for due process protections for the parents/legal custodians of the child.”

It’s heartening to hear these kinds of sentiments after years of mostly official silence on this subject. But will this new system work?

Marilyn Yamamoto deserves a lot of deference on this issue. As an advocate for parents caught up in the child welfare bureaucracy, for many years she’s been tirelessly pointing out the state’s failure to comply with 9th Circuit decisions and the practices in most other Western states. She’s the one who alerted me to the whole issue, in fact.

Yamamoto believes that the “reasonable cause” test is a step in the right direction, but she thinks the bills should go further in explaining what that means — that the police or CWS are in possession of specific, articulable evidence showing that the child is likely to be injured in the time it would take to get a court order. Making it clear, in other words, that it’s not just a gut feeling.

That’s also the view of Shawn McMillan, a San Diego attorney who has made a specialty of suing child welfare agencies that fall short of meeting those 9th Circuit standards.

A key question, he said, will be how the state sets up the new, fast-track warrant process. Without that, he said, “the fix has no meaning.”

Yamamoto and other parental rights advocates also see the potential for confusion resulting from the use of the word “exigency” for police removals and “imminent harm” for CWS when it’s seeking an expedited court order. The two words mean essentially the same thing, they say, so why not use the same word?

Yet it’s clear from the two bills that the whole regulatory scheme hinges on there being some very fine distinction between those words. You could see how things could get mixed up.

Yamamoto also stresses the importance of training so that CWS social workers know the new procedure and actually do seek court orders when possible.

And success will also depend on court-appointed attorneys for accused parents advocating for adherence to the “reasonable cause” standard. I’ve written about how poorly paid these attorneys are, leading them to handle many cases at once.

There are many questions about these bills. It took me far too long to even figure out what they did, exactly — but maybe that’s just me.

Still, after writing about this issue for more than two years, I have to say that I’m encouraged to see the various players — DHS, the attorney general’s office, the courts — taking it seriously.