This pattern—accountability flowing toward the individual who was present at the resolution rather than toward the institutional failures that allowed the situation to persist—is not unique to the Garrido case. It reflects a broader difficulty in attributing accountability for systemic failures. The system failed at a structural level, across multiple agents and supervisors and years. But the individuals who supervised Garrido were not solely responsible for the structural conditions they operated within.
The Inspector General’s report was careful to describe failures at both the individual level (agents who did not conduct required home visits, supervisors who did not conduct required case reviews) and the structural level (absence of GPS monitoring policies, failure to obtain federal parole file, absence of neighbor-contact practices). Both levels of failure contributed to the outcome. Neither level alone was sufficient to explain it.
The agents who supervised Garrido before August 2009 did not know about the compound behind his fence. That is established by the nature of the outcome: if any of them had discovered the compound, the captivity would have ended. But the question is why none of them discovered it, and the answer lies in what the Inspector General’s report documented: they were not conducting the level of active, attentive supervision that the situation required, and the institutional environment they operated in did not enforce that level of supervision.
—
## The Daughters at the Campus: A Note on What Was and Was Not Known
The two daughters who accompanied Garrido to UC Berkeley’s campus on August 24 and 25 were Dugard’s children. They were not, at the time of the campus encounter, identified as missing persons or as the children of a missing person. Their presence on the Berkeley campus was not, in itself, a sign that something was legally wrong. Children accompany adults to campuses. Children have unconventional home schooling arrangements. Children dress in ways that observers find unusual.