JAIL SEX JOLT
Stunning surge in officer abuse accusations
THE NUMBER of city inmates alleging sexual abuse and harassment by correction officers has more than quadrupled over the past three years, records released Tuesday show.
Complaints filed by detainees against jail staffers spiked from 163 in 2014 to 772 in 2016, according to the city's Board of Correction. There have 418 such complaints lodged this year, records show.
The increase is in part tied to inmates now being allowed to make free calls to the city’s 311 complaint line, one correction insider said.
The overwhelming majority of the complaints filed last year remain under investigation, department records show. Only one was “substantiated,” the data reveals.
City investigators are supposed to complete their reviews within 90 days, under federal guidelines.
“The failure to complete timely investigations is not acceptable,” said board member Robert Cohen.
The federal monitor overseeing the city Correction Department has also criticized the agency’s investigative unit.
The spike in cases comes as the city agreed last month to pay about $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by two women who said they were repeatedly raped by a correction officer.
That lawsuit argued that there was a “pervasive culture of rape and other sexual abuse” at the facility housing female inmates.
In a separate court filing, a former inmate, identified as Jane Doe, alleges she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by close to a dozen correction officers and a doctor during two separate detentions in October 2013 and January 2014. She is suing the city for $15 million in federal court.
During one assault, the woman accuses officers of sodomizing her with a flashlight and ignoring her repeated pleas for help as she lay bleeding on a cell floor.
City lawyers have tried to get the case tossed.
“Her account, on its face, appears questionable and farfetched,” city lawyer Michael Gertzer told Judge Nathaniel Fox last year.
The woman says that when she got to Rikers she was separated from other new arrivals and taken to a remote, and secret, basement. There, she claims in court papers, that she was stripped naked, chained to a toilet and repeatedly sexually assaulted and sodomized with a flashlight. The assaults, by male and female officers, continued for several days, the unidentified woman alleges in her lawsuit.
The woman — who attended Lee Strasberg acting school — also says she was beaten by a bus driver assigned to take her to and from court.
The accusations were reviewed by the Bronx district attorney’s office, which declined to bring any criminal charges.