Hurubie-Mako
The writer worked as a gun violence reporter at The Kansas City Star.
Amid a suicide crisis in New York City’s jails, a correction officer falsified records to show that scores of her peers had taken a suicide prevention course that they had not actually completed, Bronx prosecutors and the Department of Investigation said.
The Rikers Island officer, Vinette Tucker-Frederick, was said by the Bronx district attorney’s office to have awarded credit for the course to 74 officers who were on leave in 2021. She gave their login information to colleagues and told them to take the digital training in the place of the absent officers, prosecutors said.
The Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark, said in a statement that Tucker-Frederick’s directions had resulted in the officers’ receiving credit “despite the fact that they weren’t even on Rikers Island.”
A nine-year veteran of the Department of Correction, Tucker-Frederick, 41, was charged with tampering with public records and identity theft, and has been suspended indefinitely without pay. Her lawyer, Peter C. Troxler, said she “adamantly maintains her innocence and has every expectation of being exonerated.”
The acts described by prosecutors came as the department was under pressure to remedy the growing crisis of suicide among incarcerated people, Clark said. At least 13 people are thought to have killed themselves in the jails since the beginning of 2021.
The rash of suicides that year coincided with mass absenteeism among correction officers that sent the long-troubled jail complex on Rikers Island into a spiral of violence and chaos. Without guards in key posts, conditions sharply deteriorated; New York lawmakers who visited described what they saw as a humanitarian crisis.
Rates of self-harm rose precipitously at that time. In August 2021, the court-appointed monitor who oversees conditions at Rikers, Steve J. Martin, wrote that there had been four suicides since December 2020 and expressed concern about “the adequacy of staff’s response.” Staff members acted slowly to confront emergencies, he noted.
Louis A. Molina, commissioner of the Department of Correction, said on Friday that jail officials are working to improve conditions, and that corruption is unacceptable.
According to the department, all uniformed staff are trained in suicide prevention upon joining, and 68 per cent had received a refresher course, up from 37 per cent on Jan. 1. “This act was the kind of egregious behaviour that was tolerated in the past and has no place in this administration,” Molina said in a statement. “Suicide prevention training is critical for any public safety organisation and especially for a correctional facility. We continue to push this important training to all of our employees and will hold everyone accountable.”
Clark, who is in a primary race against Tess Cohen, who has been critical of her oversight of Rikers, has announced three indictments related to the jail complex in recent days. Clark’s office indicted a former correction officer who is charged with accepting a $2,500 bribe to smuggle a cell phone to a detainee. It also charged four detainees with brutally beating another incarcerated person, lacerating his spleen, which needed to be removed.
Though Friday’s charges cover events said to have taken place during the last administration, the Department of Correction has continued to be criticised for lacking transparency. Recent reports from the federal monitor, Martin, have taken direct aim at the agency’s leaders, saying that violence within the city’s jails is unabated, while officials hide information.
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