Beatings increase at Rikers
THE CITY’S Correction Department “has not made significant progress” to reduce violent officer beatdowns despite new leadership and added resources over the past two years, according to a new report by a federal monitor.
“The use of force has continued to increase rather than diminish, even as the inmate population has decreased,” said the 190-page report published Wednesday by independent monitor Steve Martin.
The violence by officers against inmates includes “head strikes, misusing chemical agents, use of prohibited holds, needlessly painful escort tactics, and incidents escalated by staff.”
Some of the bad actors are: l A jail captain caught on video hitting an inmate eight times inside a holding pen. Four days before that incident, the same captain was supervising a probe team transferring “an inmate in a painful position resulting in a fractured digit and lacerations to the inmate’s wrists.” l An officer who hit an inmate seven times during a probe team response. l An officer who sprayed an entire intake cell full of inmates with pepper spray.
Inmate advocates were dismayed by the latest findings, which follows an April 2017 report by Martin that said violence in city jails was “seriously problematic” and that use of force against inmates continued in “unabated fashion.”
“At this point, there is no excuse for the city’s longstanding failure to hold supervisory staff — wardens, deputy wardens and captains — responsible for the misuse of force, unprofessionalism, and inept and biased investigations on their watches,” said Mary Lynne, director of Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society. It wasn’t all bad news. The overall rate of violence for younger inmates “is trending downwards,” the monitor found.
As a result of the report, the department announced a “new, comprehensive action plan to promptly address key areas of concern.”
The plan includes deploying special use of force de-escalation teams, increasing gang intelligence to stop attacks before they happen, and boosting real-time video monitoring and analysis.
The new initiative also entails overhauling the department’s review process before possible force incidents as well as assigning mentoring captains to assist with retraining.