The federal monitor overseeing city jails recommended Monday that a judge consider holding the Adams administration in contempt for failing to implement promised improvements to safety on Rikers Island, possibly paving the way for a federal takeover of city jails.
In his report to U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, the monitor, Steve Martin, documented, with images from surveillance footage, several horrific incidents from recent weeks in which correction officers lost control at the jails. In one incident a detainee blocked an officer from intervening in a group assault on another detainee, and in another, nine detainees entered a detainee’s cell after midnight and allegedly assaulted him physically and sexually for 16 minutes even though an officer was stationed nearby.
Martin’s recommendation that the court initiate contempt proceedings against the city, Department of Correction, and Correction Commissioner Louis Molina is an extraordinary break from the more collaborative approach the monitoring team has previously taken. If found in contempt of the Nunez federal consent decree of 2015, which led to the installation of a federal monitor to oversee mandated safety improvements at the jail, the city itself and correction officials could be fined.
But Martin said beyond the contempt proceedings, “additional” measures are needed to “catalyze the substantive changes required to protect the safety and welfare of the many people held in custody and who work in the jails.” Those measures, based on precedents in other cities, could be a federal receivership, which would strip the city of control of the jails and put them in the hands of a court-appointed receiver.
While Martin didn’t mention the word “receiver” in his 288-page report, some activists, defense attorneys, and elected officials who have argued for receivership in recent months read his comments as signaling support. Swain could allow papers to be filed seeking a receivership next…
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