Mayor Know-It-All’s Rikers Nonsense

It turns out you can shame Mayor de Blasio into visiting the Rikers Island jail complex but you can’t make him talk to the “little people” there — because (he says) he already knows it all.

Only a “Mission Accomplished” banner was missing from de Blasio’s happy-talk presser Monday afternoon about his belated visit (his first since 2017) — where he toured an empty intake facility and spoke with neither any detainees nor any correction officers.

Nope: He only chatted with his own chosen leadership, which Steve Martin, the federal monitor overseeing Rikers, says is “failing” and needs “outside expertise” to fix “systemic mismanagement.”

The mayor’s plans to end the nightmare “are not sufficient to address the imminent risk of harm to people in custody and staff flowing from the poor operation of the jails,” Martin warned the federal court.

De Blasio, by contrast, on Tuesday praised Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi for “some real progress” and insisted he already knows everything he needs to about the jail, lecturing The Post’s Julia Marsh: “I’ve over the years . . . talked to folks who were in Rikers as inmates, have talked to officers. I have a pretty strong understanding of the extent of the problems.”

If his understanding is so strong, how did he let things get so out of hand? The inmate death rate is four times where it was a few years ago; guards regularly work double and triple shifts, and key posts are still left empty. Human waste strews the facility.

His only answer is as many “Get out of jail free” cards as he can hand out to reduce the Rikers population — as if criminals will reduce crime proportionately.

His “Replace Rikers” scheme, meanwhile, is dead in the water as target communities resist his plans for new neighborhood jails (which would lack the capacity to handle even the current Rikers population).

His successor will not only need to fix the current mess but come up with a viable modernization plan that treats inmates and guards humanely and keeps violent perps off the streets.