NYC must commit to full and transparent inquiries for Rikers deaths – New York

Rikers Island, that wretched plot next to LaGuardia Airport that was a dump before it became a place to dump people awaiting trial, is working well only for the undertaker.

With the second death in the span of one week coming last Friday, the complex has claimed the lives of 11 people so far this year, well on the way to outpacing the 16 deaths of 2021, despite a slight year-over-year downtick in the daily jail population. While the Department of Correction has maintained that some of the increased mortality is downstream from the COVID pandemic, vaccination rates keep increasing and most of what we know points to factors other than the pandemic.

But we don’t know nearly enough. What has been publicly reported about the circumstances of these deaths, and consequently the individual or system failures that led to them, is fuzzy and incomplete. We know, for example, that 34-year-old Michael Lopez died of a suspected drug overdose on Friday. We probably won’t know for weeks, months or years the exact set of circumstances and oversights that led to his demise, such as how we got the drugs he used, how long it took for correction staff to respond to the emergency, and what could be shifted about the DOC’s approach to prevent other such tragedies.

Despite the glut of agencies tasked with investigating fatalities in custody, the inquiries can drag on and on, all while more people suffer and die. Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who oversees the settlement in class-action litigation against violence at Rikers, should use her power to force the DOC to adopt more transparency, if only to prove that it is not just repeating its mistakes ahead of the November deadline to improve the system.

To ensure that fast, efficient and transparent investigations become the norm, the City Council should codify far-too-loose standards and deadlines, perhaps funded by the DOC’s bloated budget for ineffective management. Without a rigorous and reliable accounting around each death, we’re flying blind and will keep crashing.