Mayor defends DOC amid spate of detainee deaths
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams tours facilities on Rikers Island on Wednesday, June 22, 2022. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
Following the deaths of three detainees in less than a week, Mayor Eric Adams made a trip to Rikers Island on Wednesday to tout the Department of Correction’s clamp down on illegal weapons and to defend the agency's officers who have come under fire in the past year for missing work in large numbers.
Adams, who was joined by DOC Commissioner Louis Molina, said that correctional officers had seized around 2,700 illegal weapons possessed by incarcerated people on the island after the DOC resumed a search operation that has been suspended for months.
He said the confiscating of the weapons has contributed to a decrease in violence in the jails. Slashings and stabbings, one of the main metrics used to measure a jail’s dangerousness, have dropped by 63 percent since March, according to the mayor. Additionally, use-of-force incidents have fallen by around 27 percent in the first six months of this year when compared to the same six month period last year.
“Were able to recover these weapons because Commissioner Molina came in and resumed the tactical search operation that had been previously suspended,” Adams said. “We stopped the tactical search operation that allows us to retrieve this because those who are not protecting inmates wouldn’t allow us.”
“As politicians normally do, they succumbed to the loudness,” Adams added. “Not me. Ignore the noise and get the job done.”
At the heart of Adams’ remarks Wednesday was the defense of corrections officers – the former mayor, former DOC commissioner, the federal monitor, several judges and the Board of Correction have all pointed to mass absences among the correctional officers’ ranks as the main cause of the disarray within the jail complex.
On average, around 900 of the approximately 7,000 uniformed officers within the DOC miss work per day either due to illness or because they’ve gone AWOL. Last summer, at the height of the staffing crisis, the DOC was averaging around 2,000 missing officers per day.
In recent months, the DOC has upped the number of visits they make to the homes of officers claiming to be out sick or who were reported to be AWOL, according to recent court filings. Since May 1, the DOC has suspended 52 correctional officers and a captain for allegedly violating the agency’s staffing policies, the agency said.
On Wednesday, Adams celebrated the fact that 1,400 officers had returned to work under Molina, who took office in January.
“This has been an agency that has been ignored, has been an agency that every day, in spite of all of the negative news, they come every day to do the job,” Adams said. “They have been calling out for years, saying, ‘We need help, we need help, we need help.’ And the problems that they have been facing did not start in 2022. In fact, this started generations ago.”
He said that the spate of recent deaths – two people died in Rikers in the past four days and another died while in DOC custody earlier this week – the officers shouldn’t be blamed.
Instead, he said that detainees should be better monitored for health issues, both mental and physical, and said that pre-existing conditions have played an outsized role in the nine in-custody deaths this year and the 16 last year, which marked an eight year high.
“They have pre-existing conditions, their health crises, mental health illnesses, all of the things that people are facing at the worst end of their lives are discovered when they come here,” the mayor said.
“By the time people reach Rikers, their health has deteriorated and they come to these facilities,” he added. “Now, if you're telling me, ‘Eric, three people were stabbed, and three people were murdered,’ now we're talking about a different conversation.”
But getting people medical care has proven a major difficulty for DOC staff.
In May, a state judge ruled that the DOC was in contempt of court for not complying with a December ruling that found that the DOC was not making sick calls available to incarcerated individuals a minimum of five days per week within 24 hours of a medical request.
In a January letter to the court, DOC Bureau Chief of Facility Operations Ada Pressley blamed the agency’s inability to produce detainees for medical appointments on “the biggest increase in members of service out sick in December 2021 and January 2022, with 1,831 and 2,229 members of service reported sick, respectively.”
A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society, which represents the class of incarcerated people in the case that resulted in the creation of the federal monitor, decried Adams’ response to the recent in-custody deaths on Wednesday.
“That the Mayor visited Rikers Island and did not take responsibility for the deaths of nine people who have died in City custody this year, including the two New Yorkers since Sunday, is both irresponsible and callous,” the public defense organization said.
“Mayor Adams and Commissioner Molina have not acted with urgency and commitment to run the jails with even basic levels of correctional competence,” they added. “While Mayor Adams makes these press announcements, people held inside the jails are unsupervised as staff continue to stay home from work with impunity and basic jail services remain in limbo. The extraordinarily high death rate on Mayor Adams’ watch, and the suffering of all who are kept in abysmal conditions inside, are a humanitarian crisis that this Administration seems incapable of rectifying any time soon.”
Adams’ remarks came not long after federal Judge Laura T. Swain accepted the city’s action plan designed to reduce violence in Rikers. Though both the Legal Aid Society and the federal monitor’s team expressed varying degrees of reservations about the DOC’s ability to implement the plan, Swain gave the city until the fall to put it to practice.
Should the DOC not meet the goals it set for itself within the plan, Swain could potentially order the jail to be taken over by a federal authority, a judicial order known as a federal receivership.
