NYC Correction Department discipline in ‘measurable’ decline as Rikers leaders struggle to deal with employee rule breaking, violence

He’s known by the nickname AButta — and Correction Department investigators had evidence the Rikers Island officer wasn’t very sick when he was on paid sick leave and organized a well-advertised “summer jam” party at a Brooklyn club.

The officer, Antoine Harris, was slapped with disciplinary charges for throwing the party while he was on the paid leave.

But the case against Harris was inexplicably dropped before it reached a conclusion — as were hundreds or perhaps thousands of other disciplinary cases during the tenure of ex-Deputy Correction Commissioner Manuel Hernandez, who abruptly departed the agency on March 31 amid questions by a federal court monitor about the department’s disciplinary procedures.

Harris not only kept his job — his salary rose. In 2022, records show, he earned $138,538 — nearly $20,000 more than in 2021.

That his discipline case died is not unusual, says the report released Monday by the court-appointed monitors, Steve Martin and his deputy, Anna Friedberg, who with their staff track violence at Rikers Island and the Correction Department’s handling of it.

Their report is clear: In an overwhelming majority of discipline cases brought against correction officers over the past year, nothing happened.

Martin’s report says that after Hernandez began work leading the Correction Department’s investigation division in May 2022, the division saw “a measurable diminution” of its performance. The report says Hernandez’s departure “creates an opportunity for the department to prevent further deterioration and to regain the ground that has been lost.”

While Correction Commissioner Louis Molina publicly touted an aggressive approach on discipline to the City Council, discipline cases were being closed without any determination of the legality of officers’ actions or any punishment, the monitors’ report says. Many of those cases, say the monitors, involved excessive use of force.

The cases were closed last year in a range of questionable ways, the report found. And compared with previous years, the percentage of cases getting thorough investigations in 2022 plummeted, the data show.

Of 3,902 use-of-force cases received from July through December, 1,984 were closed with no action — some 51% of all cases, the highest percentage in at least three years, Martin and his staff reported.

The percentage of cases referred for a full investigation plummeted to 2%, or 84 of 3,902 cases — a sharp drop compared with prior years.

One factor in the decline was that the Correction Department reduced the number of investigators assigned to conduct full investigations from 51 in July 2021 to an “insufficient” 10 by December 2022, the report said.

Martin and his staff concluded that the department “reduced the priority” of full investigations. A much smaller unit that focused only on highly complex cases involving use of force handled 15 cases in the second half of 2022, the report said.

Charges were dropped in at least 485 cases in which correction officers used physical force to combat or quell city jail detainees that was “excessive, unnecessary or avoidable,” the report said.

Those 485 dropped cases included allegations involving blows to detainees’ heads and higher-level uses of force that are required to be fully investigated. “The monitoring team’s review of intake investigations revealed that did not occur consistently or reliably during this period,” the report said.

The monitors expressed “skepticism and concern” over the investigation division’s explanations for why cases weren’t sent for full investigation.

A total of 1,389 cases were sent to individual Rikers jails to set discipline. It’s unclear what happened to those cases, but historically, jail wardens have been reluctant to discipline the officers they rely on — yet Molina returned some of that authority to them.

Investigations often failed to identify breakdowns in procedure that led officers to use force and engage in misconduct using force. Those issues were “overlooked or ignored,” Martin and his staff said.

The report said that was particularly a problem with the department’s Emergency Service Unit — known by detainees as “turtles” for the Teenage Ninja Turtle-appearing gear members of the unit wear when they are sent to jails.

Martin and his staff have often cited the Emergency Service Unit as resorting too quickly to extreme force. Their latest report says the unit “continues to utilize problematic security practices that catalyze, rather than prevent, a use of force, and is staffed with individuals who may not be suited for the position.”

The Correction Department also appears to have tried to speed up the case closure process, the monitor disclosed. In the second six months of 2022, Correction Department investigators closed 907 disciplinary cases without action — 74% more than the 522 cases they closed in the first half of the year.

An additional 270 cases were dismissed because of apparent screwups in meeting a 30-day deadline to file charges or a failure to draft charges or even to make a record of a given complaint, the report said.

Because of the reduced staffing and vastly larger number of cases closed without action, the quality of investigations suffered — they became “incomplete, inadequate and unreasonable,” the monitor said.

“Many of the investigations were substandard and could easily be discredited,” the report said.

Along the way, the percentage of officers actually referred for discipline dropped by more than half.

From 2016 to 2021, roughly 7% of all officers were tapped for discipline. After Hernandez was appointed in May 2022, the number dropped to 3%.

Correction Commissioner Molina can rightfully say he fired 10 officers for use of force in 2022, double that in the five years before combined. In December, he told the City Council he had “closed out” 2,200 cases in 11 months, “likely more than any commissioner of any city agency in New York City history,” he said.

But if the Correction Department disciplinary system is a pyramid with fired officers at the top, it’s the wide base of the pyramid of officers who go undisciplined or lightly disciplined that is under question.

And the questions arise even as the monitor conceded things were improving before Molina fired the well-regarded ex-Brooklyn sex crimes prosecutor Sarena Townsend in January 2022, and a few months later installed in her place his friend, mentor and former police precinct commander, Hernandez.

“This kind of rapid deterioration isn’t just about one deficient or incompetent leader, because it took a whole team of people — supervisors and line staff — to consistently ignore available evidence, close investigations prematurely, or turn a blind eye to obvious misconduct over a period of several months,” said Kayla Simpson, staff attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners Rights Project.

“A division so central to accountability should not be so fragile that one person can corrupt it so quickly,” Simpson said.

That Correction Department leaders let the investigation division deteriorate so quickly even as Molina claimed progress in holding department staffers accountable, Simpson said, “is yet more evidence that addressing the rot within [the department] will require extraordinary measures that the city has not been willing to take.”

Behind the scenes during the Hernandez era, there was deep discontent among investigators. It was routine for the conclusions even of veteran investigators to be questioned or pushed aside, three sources with knowledge of the situation said. Officers assigned to the unit found themselves suddenly transferred to less desirable jail posts.

As a result of this discontent, 22 people quit the office in 2022 followed by an “exodus” of an additional 25 in January.

Martin’s report suggests investigators were pressured for prejudged outcomes.

“[Under Hernandez] staff had been influenced or prompted, either overtly or implicitly, to adopt a more lenient approach when assessing cases and to change their practice in ways that compromised the quality of the investigations,” the report stated.

“It seemed like he was getting orders from Molina,” a former investigator said of Hernandez. That source said there seemed no logic for some investigative decisions: “There were cases where there was no misconduct and the officer was charged, and others where an officer who needed to get charged was not.”

Martin and Friedberg did not reply to requests for comment.

Maureen Sheehan, who was the department’s deputy director of Investigation in 2021, before Molina arrived, explained the importance of the investigation division’s independence.

“You want the separation [of the investigation division from the rest of the department’s management] so there’s integrity,” she said. “You answer to the commissioner, but the unit also has to be independent.”

Other observers suggest Hernandez should not have been appointed because he was Molina’s detective squad commander in the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village.

“That’s what you get when you remove a seasoned attorney and replace that person with a former cop close to the commissioner,” said a former director of Correction Department investigations during the 1990s. “It’s why you can’t have the police policing the police.”

But a jail insider offered an alternate perspective, describing Hernandez as a law enforcement professional aware the Correction Department can’t discipline its way out of the staffing crisis blamed for Rikers’ problems.

“The federal monitor took aim at Hernandez because he was an impediment to the monitor’s overzealous drive to slap disciplinary charges against staff in cases where discipline wasn’t even warranted,” the insider said.

“Unfortunately, the monitor continues to have an outsized influence over the operations of the jails, and his desire for a disciplinary quota system has more to do with justifying his own existence than with improving the conditions in our jails.”

David Kirsch, an attorney who often represents correction officers, said during Hernandez’s tenure, force cases seemed to have taken a back seat to tamping down problems caused by thousands of officers who are believed to have falsely claimed illness as a reason to go on paid sick leave.

“There was a concerted effort by [the Correction Department] to focus on disciplining officers who were legitimately out sick,” Kirsch explained. “I’m not referring to the few bad apples that were abusing the sick leave policy. I’m actually referring to the men and women who were legitimately hurt.”

Lawyers for the correction officers union did not reply to requests for comment on the monitor’s findings.

It’s extremely rare for officers to be charged criminally. In the seven years since the consent judgment that led to Martin’s federal court appointment, only 117 use-of-force cases out of tens of thousands have been referred for criminal prosecution, the monitor reports. And just eight of those cases have resulted in criminal charges.

This sets up a situation where serious misconduct cases rejected by prosecutors languish, undermining later attempts to discipline the officers involved, the report said. Thus, even the worst, most well-documented cases can result in no discipline.

“There is no evidence to suggest that practices have materially improved since the inception of the consent judgment,” the report said.