Correction officers’ union challenges key hire by Rikers remediation manager

Benny Boscio, the president of the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association, said in a letter to a federal judge that he and his union were opposed to the re-hiring of Sarena Townsend, who previously served as the lead investigator into staff abuses on Rikers Island. AP file photo by Jeenah Moon

By Jacob Kaye

The powerful union representing correctional officers on Rikers Island this week asked a federal judge to "reassess" the recent hiring of an ex-Department of Correction investigator tapped by the remediation manager to reprise her role in the city’s jail complex.

The Correctional Officers Benevolent Association said in a letter to federal Judge Laura Swain that she should reconsider the recent hiring of Sarena Townsend by Nicholas Deml, the remediation manager whom Swain granted broad powers to address the persistent violent conditions on Rikers Island. The union’s letter was first reported by Gothamist.

Townsend was one of the first hires made by Deml, who officially began working as remediation manager earlier this year and has since assumed major control over the day-to-day management of Rikers Island per the judge’s order.

In the letter written by COBA President Benny Boscio, the union said Townsend, who previously worked as the DOC’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and investigation before being ousted by Mayor Eric Adams’ first DOC commissioner, Louis Molina, was unfit for the job because of an alleged bias Boscio said she had toward the union.

Townsend, who has run a private practice representing criminal defendants and employees facing discipline from their employers, including DOC officers, was hired by Deml last month as part of a major restructuring within the agency that will see investigations into alleged wrongdoing by officers fall directly under the remediation manager’s authority instead of the DOC’s. The City Reporter was the first to report on Townsend’s hiring in May and the Eagle was the first to report on the organizational restructuring.

Townsend was once put in charge of clearing a massive backlog of claims of officer abuse made by detainees alongside Swain’s federal monitor, Steve J. Martin, who praised her in a court filing in 2021 shortly before Molina let her go with little explanation. COBA celebrated her firing in a social media post at the time, claiming she was a “puppet of a remote fed monitor hellbent on destroying the morale of our essential workforce by writing them up on frivolous charges.”

In the years since her firing from the DOC, Townsend has remained active in the city’s criminal justice community, opining online and to news publications about a number of issues regarding Rikers Island and on high-profile criminal cases.

COBA said in its letter that many of Townsend’s social media posts were disqualifying for the position.

“Re-hiring Ms. Townsend as [senior deputy commissioner of investigation, intelligence, and accountability]...is a regressive decision,” the union said. “This will ultimately prevent the overall goal of bringing positive reform to the DOC.”

“Ms. Townsend is not the person to bring this goal to fruition,” they added. “Ms. Townsend has, in numerous social media posts and in print media, blamed COBA for her 2022 dismissal from DOC and continuously displayed a clear bias toward COBA and COBA members.”

The letter cites social media posts where Townsend called COBA a “bad actor” and “corrupt.”

The union also claimed that Townsend’s work as a private attorney created a number of conflicts in the new role, citing cases where she represented clients suing the DOC.

“Ms. Townsend’s conflicts due to her prior time at DOC, and in her private sector representations since leaving DOC, would have disqualified her from consideration in the selection process established by the court for the [remediation manager] position,” the letter read. “Those same conflicts make her a deeply flawed selection for SDC.”

The letter closes by claiming Townsend has returned to the agency to “exact revenge upon COBA and its membership.”

Sarena Townsend was hired by the remediation manager to lead investigations into allegations of correctional officer abuse on Rikers Island. Photo via Townsend Law PLLC

The union’s letter was submitted as a “friend of the court” communication. The union is not a party to the ongoing detainee civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York which led to the creation of the remediation manager position.

With the exception of COBA’s criticism, Townsend, a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, has mostly been praised for her work.

Following her initial hiring by the DOC under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021, the federal monitor called her “highly competent” and said she had “demonstrated commitment to reforming the department’s disciplinary process to ensure cohesive management of these issues.”

The new investigation unit Townsend will lead marks a new approach to staff accountability in an attempt to address the abuses at the heart of Nunez v. the City of New York.

In 2024, Swain ruled that the city was in violation of 18 provisions of a decade-old consent judgment in the case, including several related to the DOC’s inconsistent use of force investigations and its inability to hold staff accountable.

While the DOC has at times come into partial compliance with staff investigations and accountability provisions, it has often quickly reverted to non-compliance after periods of improvement.

Swain said in her 2024 ruling that the DOC’s Investigation Division “still cannot consistently identify misconduct when it occurs” and that “consequently, some DOC staff are not held accountable for misconduct, and corrective action is not always applied.”

The quality of the DOC’s investigations into staff appeared to take a nose dive following Adams’ appointment of Molina, according to the monitor.

Martin said in an April 2023 report that a “disturbing trend” in the investigations unit began to show itself half a year after Molina took office – shortly after he fired Townsend.

“Beginning in summer 2022, a discernible deterioration in the quality of investigations conducted by ID was identified and there was evidence that ID was not consistently addressing or analyzing the available evidence and their conclusions did not appear to be objective,” the monitor said at the time.

According to Martin, a greater number of investigations were being closed without action, a significantly smaller number of cases were being referred for further investigation, and misconduct was being identified much less frequently than in the past.

He also said that staff at the unit “had been influenced or prompted, either overtly or implicitly, to adopt a more lenient approach when assessing cases and to change their practice in ways that compromised the quality of the investigations.”

While the DOC began to address the issues within the investigations unit, it still has not been able to come into full compliance with the consent judgment.

In the monitor’s most recent compliance report, which was issued in January, Martin said that while the investigation division had “emerged from the state of turmoil that began in 2022 and ended in spring 2024…addressing the damage from ID’s mismanagement will take time.”

According to the monitor, the DOC’s inability to consistently conduct rigorous investigations has contributed to its troubles with reining in use of force incidents and other claims of misconduct by staff.

Though the rate of use of force incidents has declined by 6 percent over the last year, it remains higher than it did before the pandemic, according to DOC data.

The monitor described a number of disturbing use of force incidents in his January report.

Among them was an incident that unfolded in December 2025 when a group of correctional officers were walking a detainee back to his housing area on Rikers Island. With the detainee’s hands cuffed behind his back and his feet in shackles, he fell to the floor and began convulsing. Thinking he was faking the episode, six officers told the man to get up, while a seventh officer walked into a janitor’s closet, away from the cameras in the hall.

Inside the closet, the officer covered the bottom of his boot in pepper spray, and then walked out and put his boot directly in front of the detainee’s face. When the man began to convulse again, an officer turned him on his side and moved him closer to the closet, putting his face directly next to an orange bootprint. After the man began to complain about the pepper spray on the floor, the officer bent the detainee’s wrists, causing him to scream in pain.

“Don’t resist, sir,” the officer said.

The incident was under investigation by the Investigation Division at the time of the report.