For years reporters with the NY Times and the NY Daily News have negatively affected the reputation of correction officers with half truths, misinformation or only printing one side of the story, sometimes in the pursuit of sensationalism.
Many officers are currently working 100-200 hours of mandated overtime per month. And from 2020-2023 they were forced to work up to 32 consecutive hours without even a meal break, bringing their monthly total to over 200 hours.
Carriage horses in NYC are protected by laws, and rightfully so, that prohibit them from working more than nine hours a day and also require that they be well fed. Yet, little public support for officers from the DOC top leadership regarding this egregious amount of forced overtime and lack of meal breaks.
Over the last nine years, correction officers have been vilified to such an extent that it has become akin to the pillory of Medieval times when a person’s head and hands were shackled through the holes of a wooden rack exposing them to public humiliation and scorn.
In past reports to the federal Judge, the Rikers monitor Steve Martin has referred to correction officers as “hyper-confrontational”. Martin recently stated that DOC has a “large number of staff who lack elementary skills” and many uniformed supervisors “have only marginal competence in the skills necessary to provide effective supervision”.
In March 2023, former commissioner Louis Molina, who held that position from Jan. 1, 2022 through Dec. 8, 2023, testified before the City Council where he said, “More than 800 members of service were suspended for misconduct, which is a greater number than the prior two years combined; and more than 250 members of services were terminated, which is more than by any other commissioner in recent history”.
Is Martin being objective and was Molina trying to break records, or do they both have a self-serving agenda?
After almost 29 years of service with the DOC, I can unequivocally say that the majority of the uniformed force are unsung heroes who work under grueling conditions and many of those suspensions and terminations were the result of draconian discipline and not necessary.
No other agency in NYC is derided, held in contempt and unjustly disciplined as is DOC’s uniformed force. And they continue to be gaslighted and scapegoated for the political, administrative and policy failures of others. As a result, staff retention is difficult, and recruitment is low.
The unjust chastisement and bias hurled at the uniformed force by politicians, the federal monitor, advocacy groups and the media must be denounced.
