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2021-09-12 -Lurid Crime Tales-
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NYC jails boss admits 'serious problems' at Rikers Island
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 [NYPOST] The head of the city’s jails on Thursday acknowledged "serious problems" at Rikers Island, just hours after The Post exclusively revealed video clips of three inmates attacking another and a group of inmates partying inside a cell. Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said he hadn’t seen the disturbing cellphone recordings that were posted on TikTok but didn’t dispute their authenticity during an afternoon news conference.
"The level of disorder here is deeply, deeply troubling," Schiraldi said after being told what the videos show. "I’m not going to deny that there are serious problems here."
Schiraldi said work was underway to repair an unspecified number of broken cell doors in Rikers’ Robert N. Davoren Complex for young males, where the video that shows inmates dancing to music, smoking and drinking from large bottles is believed to have been shot.
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Half of the doors have been fixed, Schiraldi said, and he pledged to have the rest finished by the spring.
A front man for the city correction officers union said about 500 doors remained busted, fueling violence and other misconduct by inmates who are able to come and go virtually at will.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who hosted the virtual briefing following a meeting with Schiraldi, said he wasn’t aware of the latest video clips but said he’d seen others that show attacks on both inmates and correction officers.
"I don’t need to see this video to feel what I’m feeling. I’m angry. I’m frustrated," he said. "All of those videos trouble me all the time."
Williams described Rikers as being in a "state of emergency" and called for "emergency decarceration" to reduce the population amid staffing shortages that the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association has tied to injuries inflicted on its members by out-of-control inmates.
Schiraldi said that about 5,600 of the city’s 6,000 inmates were awaiting trial and that he was working with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to reach out to the city’s judges, district attorneys and defense lawyers in a bid to "see the wheels of justice turn quickly."
Mayor Comrade Bill de Blasio
 ...cryptocommie mayor of New York and for some reason a Dem candidate for president in 2020. Corrupt and incompetent, his qualifications for office seem to consist of being married to a black woman, with whom he honeymooned in Cuba. He has a preppy-looking son named Dante, whose Divine Comedy involved getting his back hair up when a police car drove past him slowly. New Yorkers voted for him, so they deserve him...
has repeatedly blamed the city’s crime problems on pending cases not being processed promptly enough, a claim that was derided by a court system front man who accused the mayor of "gaslighting."
Schiraldi — who was appointed by the outgoing mayor in May — said he hoped to improve conditions at Rikers by ending triple shifts for officers, improving morale and creating programs to occupy inmates’ time productively.
He also said the Department of Correction had hired a telemarketing company, DiRAD Technologies, to help recruit 600 additional correction officers, a fraction of the 2,000 demanded by the union.
Williams countered that there were "enough people on staff right now" if not for the 30 percent "not coming to work," and he questioned how many officers were actually "sick and hurt" and how many were exploiting contract provisions to stay home.
COBA front man Michael Skelly said that no correction officers had been hired since February 2019 despite more than 1,300 resignations prompted by the triple shifts that officers are routinely forced to work without warning.
"Don’t tell us after we’re working 25 hours...after we’re victimized by a brutal inmate assault... to suck it up and come back to work," he said.
Skelly also said that Schiraldi had increased his planned hiring by 50 percent — from 400 officers in February — in a tacit admission that Rikers was dramatically short-staffed.
The City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee plans to hold an oversight hearing Wednesday on the conditions at Rikers.
"I think the jails are in severe, severe, severe crisis. I mean, we’re seeing it every single day — hearing it from the staff at Rikers, the leadership at Rikers, lawyers for the people that are on Rikers Island," Council Speaker Corey Johnson (D-Manhattan) said.
"We need to understand what their plan is, we need to understand what they need to be able to make Rikers a safe place — because it’s not safe right now, for the folks that are incarcerated or the folks that are working there."
Councilman Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island) said, "The problem is that it’s not a surprise; the union and elected officials have been sounding the alarm on this crisis for nearly two years."
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Posted by Fred 2021-09-12 00:00||
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