DOC boss defends proposed Rikers staffing cuts

Department of Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards defended Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to cut around 600 vacant officer positions during a City Council hearing on Tuesday, June 2, 2026. File photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit

By Jacob Kaye

The commissioner of the Department of Correction on Tuesday defended a nearly 600-officer cut proposed by the mayor, despite asking the City Council for more funds to hire and recruit officers only a couple of months ago.

DOC Commissioner Stanley Richards said that a plan to reduce the DOC’s budgeted uniformed officer headcount by 586 positions in Fiscal Year 2027, as proposed in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently released executive budget, would not lead to any safety problems on Rikers Island, where four people have died this year.

While a reduction in the budget, the cut may not necessarily show itself in the jails, the DOC boss said.

The decrease won’t be made to the number of officers currently working in the jails, but to vacant positions that have been difficult for the DOC to fill.

“Uniform staff are not being terminated, and no positions are being eliminated to achieve this reduction,” Richards said during a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday.

Richards’ defense of the cut came a little more than two months after he told lawmakers that he and the Mamdani administration had a $1.4 billion plan to pay officers additional overtime and fill the 1,300 empty positions among the DOC’s ranks, amNY reported at the time.

But the mayor’s latest budget proposal appeared to be taking the agency’s staffing in the other direction.

The commissioner said the proposed budget for the agency for the coming year reflected “difficult choices and a commitment to operating reasonably while continuing to move [the] department forward.”

Richards said the cut to vacant positions was based on the DOC’s projected recruitment and attrition projections – the cuts are only being proposed for around a little less than half of the DOC’s total vacant uniformed positions.

While the DOC recently graduated a class of around 260 rookie officers, another 460 were eligible for retirement in May – over 80 percent of officers retire when they become eligible to do so.

While Mamdani’s budget proposal allows for 6,674 uniformed officers on the DOC’s payroll, the agency currently employs fewer officers. As of last month, there were around 5,700 officers working in the city’s jails. The number of officers on Rikers has been declining every year for the past half decade, according to DOC data.

“Our actual uniform staffing levels remain well below our authorized headcount,” Richards said on Tuesday. “The department will continue to recruit at full force through investing in aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns to attract new staff.”

Even with the declines in staff, the DOC’s officer-to-detainee ratio remains one of the highest in the country.

The cut to the vacant positions also comes as the DOC is anticipating a smaller jail population as the city eventually moves toward shutting Rikers Island and replacing it with four borough-based jail facilities, which, all together, will only be able to hold around 4,400 detainees at any given time.

While there are currently around 6,700 detainees in Rikers, Richards and Mamdani have said they are committed to reducing the number of people locked up in the city’s jails.

The commissioner said Tuesday that as the population decreases, the DOC will be able to reallocate its staff and reduce overtime.

While the DOC, under multiple mayoral administrations, has long maintained a desire for more officers, oversight agencies and authorities have said the agency doesn’t have a staff number problem, but a staff management problem.

“The Department’s particular assignment practices… are burdensome and unreliable, creating loopholes that contribute to numerous gaps in coverage that require reassigning staff from other duties, requiring staff to work significant overtime, or worst case, leaving housing unit posts unmanned,” the monitor tasked by a federal judge to keep track of conditions on Rikers said in a January report.

The critique has also been made by advocates, who decried the mayor’s first budget proposal earlier this year for not cutting back DOC staffing numbers enough.

On Tuesday, some of those advocates celebrated the decrease in the vacant positions but said the city could do more to take the money saved from those reductions and put it into programs that help prevent and reduce incarceration.

“We’ve seen some real progress in the executive budget, particularly in addressing DOC budget waste and starting to rightsize their staff as we prepare to close Rikers,” Darren Mack, the co-director of Freedom Agenda, said in a statement. “But DOC is still budgeted for four times more staff than the national average. We’re here today to call on the City Council and Mayor Mamdani to build on this important step by moving more money into the programs that can prevent and reduce incarceration.”

“Mayor Mamdani has indicated that he’s serious about following the legal and moral mandate to close Rikers,” he added. “This includes funding the things that keep communities safe, like community-based mental health treatment, housing, and services for people coming home.”