Grading De Blasio: Mayor Praised for Launching Vision Zero, But Critics Say He Didn’t Go Far Enough

 BY STEPHEN NESSEN, WNYC

Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2018, at a rally asking Albany to expand speed cameras

MICHAEL APPLETON/MAYORAL PHOTOGRAPHY OFFICE

This story is part of Gothamist/WNYC’s series, “Grading de Blasio,” which assesses the mayor’s performance during his tenure.

New York City was the first American city to adopt Vision Zero, the Swedish approach to reducing the number of people killed by drivers through changes to street design. It was an idea that Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on and launched shortly after taking office.

The program aims to reduce the number of people killed in traffic accidents to zero, but in New York City, where 230 people have been killed on average each year since 2013, this can feel like an unrealistic goal. But it’s not impossible: Helsinki recorded no traffic deaths in 2019 after starting their program in the 1960s, while Oslo, Norway went from 41 deaths in 1975 to 0 by 2019. The ambitious plan to reach zero traffic deaths by 2024, in a city of 8.5 million residents and millions more visitors, became one of the most notable pillars of de Blasio’s platform alongside his equity and universal pre-K goals.

Data and transportation experts say his Vision Zero legacy is mixed. Since the initiative launched, seven of the eight years have seen the lowest traffic-related deaths in New York City history, according to the Department of Transportation, which has street safety data going back to 1910, but it's still a long way off from de Blasio's lofty goals.

Traffic-related deaths during the de Blasio years

One way to measure de Blasio’s success with Vision Zero is examining whether there was a steady decline in the number of people killed by vehicles. So far this year, the DOT reports 255 people have been killed by drivers, the highest number of deaths since 2013, the year before de Blasio took office, when 279 people died.

On July 29th, Brandon Kay Davis, 41, became one of those casualties. His roommate Frederick Williams remembered him as a man who prided himself on his fashion and savvy when it came to getting around the city.

Davis was crossing Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, just a few doors away from his home, when he was fatally struck by a driver.

Brandon Davis (left); Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant

LEFT PHOTO: COURTESY OF FREDERICK WILLIAMS; RIGHT PHOTO: GOOGLE STREET VIEW

“It opened my eyes to what it means to have to have to be vigilant when you’re commuting by foot,” Williams, who had been friends with Davis since childhood, said. “Even if you can trust the stoplights and the sign that tells you to walk, you really don't know who's behind the wheel.”

The driver who struck and killed Davis was a 19-year-old charged with driving with a suspended license. Reports show he was arrested two years earlier for stealing a vehicle with a child in the backseat (he pleaded guilty and served a year in prison).

The driver’s car has over 28 driving violations associated with it since October. The violations include seven tickets for speeding in a school zone in one day alone, as well as running three red lights, according to city records, totaling over $2,000 in fines.

Critics, from street safety advocates to local elected officials, said a lack of serious charges against drivers involved in traffic collisions and reckless drivers has hampered the city’s ability to prevent crashes. The NYPD has even admitted its crack-downs after a cyclist is killed in traffic have been unfairly focused on cyclists, not drivers.

During the first year of Vision Zero, 2014, the city passed the Right of Way law that allows police to ticket drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians. The tickets, which were a maximum of $250 and 30 days in jail if someone was killed, were often dismissed, according to records from the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH, the agency that adjudicates the tickets.

It’s harder to judge the success of Vision Zero when looking at the number of cyclists killed year over year. There were dips followed by increases over the last eight years, with a low of 10 people killed in 2018 and a high of 27 in 2019. The year before de Blasio took office in 2013, there were 13 cyclists killed; this year 18 people have died so far.

There have been notable changes to the design of streets during de Blasio’s term, aimed at reducing the number of traffic deaths. The most widespread was reducing the city speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour across the city. This 5 mph change can mean the difference between life or death if someone is struck by a vehicle, studies show.

Another major change was the expansion of school speed cameras, which ticket drivers who exceed more than 10 mph over the speed limit and automatically issue a $50 fine. Drivers don’t get any points on their license for receiving a ticket.

The first cameras, about two dozen, were installed in 2014, but the system got a major expansion in 2019 when the state legislature finally allowed the city to put them outside 750 schools. Now, there are 1,800 cameras in 750 locations, and those operate before and after the school day, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

By 2020, the city reported traffic speeds slowed an average of 72% in those zones, and the majority of drivers who received one ticket didn’t get a second.

Designing safer streets

Another key factor in how experts measure a city getting to Vision Zero is through designing streets that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists. And the city has made thousands of small changes in the past eight years, including changing the timers at stop lights so pedestrians can get a head start and creating pedestrian islands at busy intersections that ideally force vehicles to slow down. The city has also implemented “daylighting” at many streets, which moves parked cars a few feet away from intersections so people crossing the street can see traffic coming more easily. 

The number of protected bike lanes around the city has also expanded under de Blasio.

Nowhere was redesign deployed to greater effect than along Queens Boulevard, once dubbed “the boulevard of death” for the nearly 200 deaths since 1990 along the 7-mile stretch between Roosevelt Avenue and Union Turnpike. It took nearly de Blasio’s entire two terms to complete its $100 million improvement plan, that included more crosswalks and expanded medians, with the last project – the bike lane – held up by local opposition, and a political fight. The DOT reported this year that there was a 24% decrease in the number of pedestrian fatalities and injuries along that route.

Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015, announcing improvements to Queens Boulevard

ED REED/MAYORAL PHOTOGRAPHY OFFICE.

The advocacy group Transportation Alternatives pushed de Blasio before he was even elected to view street safety as more than an environmental or quality of life issue, but as an issue about equity and health. Executive Director Danny Harris said the big changes on Queens Boulevard and the installation of busways that helped speed up bus times should’ve been replicated across the city.

The first busway on 14th Street in Manhattan was installed in 2019, and limits the vehicles allowed on the streets to give priority to buses. The MTA reports eastbound buses on 14th Street are traveling 22% to 47% faster than before the busway was created, saving riders nearly 10 minutes if they ride from one end of 14th Street to the other. Now, there are six more busways total in the city: Three in Queens, two in Manhattan (the other in Washington Heights) and two in downtown Brooklyn.

“Where have those projects been replicated at scale? Whether it's to save lives or to scale what's working?” Harris said. “No, we have a lot of great projects, but it's hard to look citywide and see a completely transformed streetscape where the streets are really meeting the needs of New Yorkers.”

De Blasio did increase the number of bike lanes, too. By the end of the year, the city expects to have completed installation of 162 miles of on-street protected bike lanes, for a total of 198 miles, as well as installing 252 miles of “conventional” — that is paint on the ground — bike lanes, for a citywide total of 482 miles. And CitiBikes are even more ubiquitous, from 6,499 bikes in 2013 to 23,472 bikes now. While Citibike is privately funded, it must work with the DOT and neighborhoods to install new docks.

Still Harris’ group said the mayor was too car-centric and refused to eliminate parking spots that he believes could’ve been put to better use.

“No one is winning on our streets because our city continues to pit us against each other,” Harris said. “The city has us all fighting for crumbs, right? You have to decide whether you want a bike corral or a tree, or a safe place for your kids to be able to cross the street. Meanwhile, you know, cars are able to do whatever they want.”

He said he was extremely disappointed with how de Blasio handled the pandemic, when it came to street safety. In May 2020, de Blasio convened a panel of transportation experts to come up with ways to use streets better when the city reopened. Harris said the mayor didn’t take up any of the groups’ recommendations or even acknowledge receiving the report.

City Council Member and soon-to-be City Comptroller Brad Lander also said the pandemic was a wasted opportunity to make major changes to street safety. “You can see in the data, sort of elevation of various kinds of mental health disorders. I think that dangerously reckless driving is in that category and that there just is more of it at the moment,” Lander said. “And we did not have any response to that.”

Lander, who’s been a vocal advocate for street safety and using the council to hold dangerous drivers accountable through city legislation, said overall de Blasio’s eight years have been uneven.

“It's always been a mixed story,” Lander said. “Some good things got done that have saved lives. But not with a fully bold agenda for transforming our streets to make them safer.”

The city stands behind its efforts.

“Vision Zero has become a national model for addressing traffic violence,” de Blasio spokesperson Mitch Schwartz wrote in a statement. “But this administration’s most powerful legacy is that the streets of New York City, simply put, look a lot different than they used to. Massive bike lane infrastructure has nurtured a cycling boom. We’ve built almost half of the bus lanes that have ever existed. New Yorkers can play outside on an Open Street and enjoy a meal in an old parking spot. None of that was easy, and there’s plenty of work left to do. But all of it made this city safer and more livable. It’s a legacy worth building on for the next phase of this fight

Bill de Blasio: How NYC can make sense of his eight years as mayor

HARRY SIEGEL, NY DAILY NEWS 

There’s an awful lot to dislike about Mayor Bill de Blasio as his eight years astride the city come to an end, following a Democratic primary in which three different members of his administration repudiated his leadership as they vied to replace him and none of the eight leading candidates wanted his endorsement other than Andrew Yang, who’s since left the party altogether.

De Blasio is a schemer and a dissembler, who came thisclose to getting indicted for his barely legal schemes and then, in what can only be called a Trump-like fashion, proclaimed that he’d been fully vindicated when prosecutors publicly scolded him for violating the spirit of the law while reluctantly announcing they wouldn’t bring criminal charges. (And, it’s worth noting, his “agents of city” argument meant to shield his conversations with outside advisors from public scrutiny is effectively the same one Trump flunky Steve Bannon is making now while refusing to testify before Congress).

Back to Bill, he’s someone who’s often seemed more interested in grand pronouncements than in the business of governing, who’s put slogans over substance and his wife in charge of a billion-dollar mental-health initiative that’s accomplished nothing measurable.

Someone who let public housing and the city’s jails continue to fall apart on his watch, while the homeless population continued growing. Who preferred railing against things he couldn’t control, like a state law for admissions to three elite public high schools, than doing the things he could, like improving the broader public school system and building a more equitable system for a wider array of “gifted” students.

He’s a pompous, prickly person who’s chronically late, and who frequently seemed miserable doing his job while spending much of his first term laying the groundwork for what proved to be an embarrassment of a presidential run and is spending his last few months laying the groundwork for what could be an equally embarrassing gubernatorial run.

How did he do? (Daily News/New York Daily News)

Who went from talking about the police as a danger to people like his son to using the NYPD as a “concierge service” for his son, and who stood behind his commissioner after the police ran riot last summer at the same time that he was using (and has continued to use) the virus as an excuse to hide from the press, insisting on remote briefings as a matter of “public health.”

I could go on, and I have over the last seven years and change, about what’s wrong with this transcendentally, historically obnoxious guy, and how he’s governed New York. About how even when he does the right thing, for instance in no longer using the police to try and arrest away the street homeless, he manages to do it the wrong way by effectively leaving deeply disturbed and dysfunctional people to their own devices in a form of far from benign neglect.

**

But we won’t have Bill de Blasio to kick around much longer, and his lengthy list of shortcomings has obscured for many New Yorkers (and, judging from the polls, most white New Yorkers) at least two big ways in which he’s lived up to the core promise he made as a mayoral candidate to leave behind a fairer, safer city.

He’s someone who had the vision to see a progressive wave rising in New York long before that was obvious, and the moxie to run for mayor as its avatar. He will depart as the first Democrat to hand City Hall over to another Democrat since Ed Koch gave way to de Blasio’s old boss David Dinkins in 1989.

And, as former News columnist Juan Gonzalez laid out in his book, “Reclaiming Gotham,” which places de Blasio and his first term in the context of a much larger grassroots progressive movement, he’s a mayor who can claim some real and often under-appreciated accomplishments in correcting the accumulated excesses of the preceding 20 years when Democrats had lost control of City Hall.

Start with universal pre-K, which has been a tremendous success and a gift to New Yorkers, saving families tens of thousands of dollars in childcare while getting more than a half million kids so far reading and socializing in a classroom environment that many of them would not otherwise have had. It’s made New York a more family friendly city, and helped many families stay here at a point in life when they might otherwise have decamped.

The very idea of UPK would have been basically inconceivable to candidates starting with the assumption that the mayor’s job is to manage the city’s existing resources and thus look for ways to cut and control spending, as had been the default since at least the city’s near bankruptcy in the 70s. But for a candidate whose appeal was based on a promise to fight inequality and give more resources to ordinary New Yorkers, it was almost necessary to have a signature proposal to pour new dollars into, in this case nearly a half-billion dollars a year.

And while candidate de Blasio talked at least as much about the millionaire’s tax he wanted Albany to implement to pay for the program as he did the program itself, he succeeded in getting the funds, though not the tax, from the state, and rolled out the program smoothly in a matter of months so that a huge, complex and arduous undertaking quickly became a good, useful and existing thing New Yorkers can simply take for granted.

To get a sense of how ambitious UPK is, consider that none of the eight Democrats vying to replace him offered anything on a remotely similar scale in a contest that often seemed to be more about moods than ideas.

On policing and police reform, too, de Blasio has rarely received his due, in no small part because of his long series of big symbolic missteps. But as lousy as de Blasio has been in talking about policing, he’s overseen a sustained period of real improvements and reforms.

While violent crime remains up here, as it is nationally, compared to where things were at the start of the pandemic, and there’s a widespread sense of growing urban disorder, New York remains an exceptionally safe big city, and the transformation of the NYPD on de Blasio’s watch has been remarkable.

As Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly were forced by the courts and the prevailing political winds to wind down their overuse of stop and frisk and Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bill Bratton continued that decline (and dropped the Bloomberg administration’s appeal of the judge’s ruling that the NYPD’s use of the tactic had been unconstitutional), it was a widely held opinion, including by this newspaper’s editorial page, that violent crime would inevitably surge. It did not.

Instead, violent crime continued to drop before the pandemic even as police stopped, frisked and arrested fewer and fewer people. By every conceivable measure, the number of bad interactions between the NYPD and civilians in the course of many millions of interactions a year continued to decline, to the point where it has raised real questions about whether or not the city still needs a Department as large as the present one.

The city got safer even as the jails continued to empty out, allowing for the deal in place now to finally close Rikers Island. The NYPD demonstrated it could maintain public safety without over-policing and over-incarcerating whole neighborhoods and populations. The idea, as CompStat creator Jack Maple would say, is “to catch the sharks, not the dolphins.”

And on de Blasio’s watch, that became more than rhetoric — demonstrating that many of the smaller “broken windows” issues that had long since been offloaded to the police as the problematic problem-solvers of last resort can, in fact, be handled by other agencies, and that it is possible to maintain public safety without dragnetting young Black and brown men.

“If eight years ago, I’d told you that the city was spending more on people who needed the help, many fewer people were getting arrested or stopped, cops almost never fired their guns, and that the city hadn’t fallen apart but was doing pretty damn well, I expect that’s a deal you would have taken,” said one administration veteran.

I certainly would have taken that deal, and it’s a foundation that Eric Adams, can build on.

 

10 Deaths, Exhausted Guards, Rampant Violence: Why Rikers Is in Crisis

A number of recent deaths have prompted questions about the notorious New York City jail complex. Here are some answers.

NY TIMES 




Conditions on Rikers Island have deteriorated to what officials say is a humanitarian crisis.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times


By Jonah E. Bromwich and Jan Ransom
Sept. 15, 2021


New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex has long had a reputation for brutal conditions, but in recent months the situation inside has spun out of control.

Ten people incarcerated at Rikers have died this year, at least five by suicide — the largest death toll at the jail in years. Gangs and other detainees are ushering other incarcerated people to and from their dorms. Relatives of those imprisoned there fear for their loved ones’ lives.

“My kid gets to go to court,” said Penny Wilkinson, the mother of Nicholas Caballero, 25, who is being held on the island as he awaits trial on assault and grand larceny charges. “I don’t want to see my child die in jail.”

Here are answers to some of the questions about what is driving the problems at the facility:
When did the crisis start?

Rikers has long been characterized by dysfunction and violence, from its opening in 1935 to the culture of brutality and corruption that led to a sweeping federal investigation into the facility a decade ago.

But the contours of today’s crisis were shaped by the coronavirus, which has infected more than 2,200 employees of the Department of Correction so far, leading to widespread staffing shortages.


“It started during Covid and it’s just spiraled out of control,” said Alice Fontier, the managing director at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, of the staffing problems.

With such an enormous number of staff members out sick, the conditions at Rikers degraded. That caused a snowball effect as additional correction officers — who are granted unlimited sick time that was only recently subject to significant restraints — started to call in sick in unusually high numbers, or simply stopped showing up.

About a year after the pandemic began, a federal monitor noted, an “extraordinarily large number of staff were not reporting to work.” At the same time, the population of detainees at Rikers was growing.

More than 1,500 people had been released to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, but the jail population eventually surpassed prepandemic levels — and the rate of self-harm among those incarcerated there began to rise sharply.

By last month, the monitor found, staff shortages had compromised the safety of everyone on the island.
How could understaffing alone have made things so much worse?

Jail officials have reported that on average, 2,000 officers were out sick or unable to work on a single day at certain points this summer. It is unclear how many were actually ill; until last month, corrections officers merely had to supply a doctor’s note within two days of calling out sick.

The commissioner of the Department of Correction, Vincent Schiraldi, said at a hearing Wednesday that he suspected that some officers were using sick days as “an unlimited vacation pool.”

Their unavailability has slowed the basic functions of Rikers to a crawl, starting with the intake process, where people normally spend less than 24 hours receiving clothes, undergoing medical checkups and being assigned to housing units.

In recent months, those hourslong stretches have turned into days and even weeks, with people held in units that do not have beds or enough cells.

Social distancing is all but impossible and incarcerated people are not supplied with masks if they lose theirs or get them dirty, at a time when Covid-19 continues to affect them. Understaffing has led to delays in dispersing food, water and medication. Many people have also experienced delays in receiving urgent medical and mental health care, and getting to court.

According to those who have toured the complex recently, certain areas are covered in garbage and urine, and some people in custody are being held in tiny showers where there is barely enough room to stand.

Who has died at Rikers and how?

The dead include Wilson Diaz-Guzman, 30, who hanged himself in his cell in January, and Javier Velasco, 30, who was found unresponsive in March with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. On Aug. 10, Brandon Rodriguez, 25, was found hanging in a shower in an intake area at the jail and on Aug. 30, Segundo Guallpa, 57, was found dead in what the Department of Correction described as a suspected suicide.

On Wednesday, the city’s chief medical examiner said that the death of Tomas Carlo Camacho, 48, in March, had also been a suicide. Mr. Camacho was found unresponsive and on his knees with his head through a small opening in the cell door known as a cuffing slot.

At least five more people have died on Rikers Island this year: Thomas Braunson III, 35, Richard Blake, 45, Jose Mejia Martinez, 35, Robert Jackson, 42 and, last week, Esias Johnson, 24.

Mr. Braunson died of an overdose and Mr. Blake of heart disease, according to the city. The causes of death of Mr. Martinez, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Johnson remain undetermined.

Allen Chey King, 51, who is being held at Rikers, said he found Mr. Johnson unresponsive in a dorm at the jail. Mr. Johnson had begged staff for medical attention in the two days leading up to his death, Mr. King said.

Guards tried to help, Mr. King said, but it seemed the clinic was backed up with patients.

“He said he was in great pain. His stomach was hurting,” Mr. King said. “He said he needed to go to clinic.”
Who is responsible for the deteriorating conditions?

Rikers is a city jail, but people are sent there because they are charged with having violated state law. That means that any attempt to solve the crisis there must occur at the tricky intersection of state and city politics.

Mr. de Blasio on Tuesday announced a plan designed to improve conditions at Rikers, which included hiring contractors to accelerate repairs and to provide medical care for staff on duty. He also said correction officers who did not show up for work would be suspended without pay.

Lawmakers described having witnessed a humanitarian crisis during their tour of the facility, where they saw dozens of people without masks packed into cells with overflowing toilets, unable to see their lawyers because they have yet to be booked. In certain intake units, people were being held in showers and relieving themselves in plastic bags.

“It’s a nightmare back there,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport.
What can be done to fix things?

On Wednesday, 21 officers who were said not to have shown up to work were suspended, according to a union that represents the city’s jail officers.

In a statement, the union’s head, Benny Boscio Jr., said that the mayor could not discipline his way out of the staffing crisis.

“More heavy-handed suspensions will only ensure officers continue to work triple and quadruple shifts with no meals and no rest,” he said.

The mayor also set a goal to speed people through the intake process in 24 hours or less, and announced plans to send some police officers to staff the court buildings, freeing up other correction officers to help at Rikers.

Several of those who visited Rikers this week said that the mayor’s plan was inadequate and would do nothing to improve conditions immediately. The jail officers’ union, which has urged the city to hire thousands more staff members, called on the mayor to resign.

Lawmakers have asked Mr. de Blasio to use his powers to allow for the early release of certain incarcerated people, as he did last spring. And they asked the mayor to visit Rikers, which he has not done since June 2017.

Mr. de Blasio has been reluctant to permit the early release of more incarcerated people, and he has denied a report that said he was considering the release of some 180 people. New York City’s police commissioner has expressed strong opposition to any early release.

Lawmakers also called on Ms. Hochul to sign the Less is More Act, a parole reform bill that would stop people accused of violating parole from being automatically detained in jails, among other things.

On Tuesday, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, and Alvin Bragg, his likely successor, also urged Ms. Hochul to sign the bill.

If she were to sign it, and to direct that it be implemented immediately, about 400 people at Rikers would be eligible for release.

Ms. Hochul has said that she is “concerned” about the conditions in city jails and that she would review the bill.

The lawmakers and advocates who visited Rikers on Monday also called for prosecutors and judges to stop sending people there while conditions remain dangerous, in part by ending the use of cash bail.

“Too many prosecutors and district attorneys across New York City are sentencing working-class New Yorkers to the possibility of death,” said Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

With Rikers in Crisis, Critics Wonder: Where Is Bill de Blasio?

Alice Fontier, the managing director of Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, spoke at a news conference outside Rikers Island on Monday. Lawmakers and others who visited the jail said the conditions inside were deplorable.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times


By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Jonah E. Bromwich and Jan Ransom
Published Sept. 14, 2021Updated Sept. 15, 2021


Facing withering criticism over a growing crisis at the Rikers Island jail complex, where 10 people have died this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday announced a five-point plan for addressing problems there and said he would visit the complex “at some point.”

Staff shortages at Rikers have led to a series of violent episodes and an unsanitary and chaotic environment inside the jail, a federal monitor said this summer. As the complex has grown less safe, calls have grown for Mr. de Blasio to go there — something he has not done in four years — and to move aggressively to improve the dangerous conditions.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat with less than four months left in office, has pledged to close Rikers in the coming years and has sought to frame the move as a key part of his progressive legacy. But he could end up leaving many of the problems to his successor.

“There has been a back-turning of this mayor on this issue,” said Tina Luongo, the attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice. “All he wants to tout is his legacy to close it in six years. His legacy is right here in what is happening on that island. And he has got to take responsibility.”


More than a dozen elected officials visited the jail on Monday, assailing conditions that several said amounted to a humanitarian crisis. They called on Mr. de Blasio to grant early release to some of those being held there, an action the mayor has resisted.

On Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio announced a plan to accelerate repairs at the complex and to move Correction Department staff members there from the courts. He also threatened to suspend without pay correction officers who do not show up to work.

“We have a situation that is just not acceptable and has to change fundamentally,” the mayor said at a news conference.

The mayor’s plan was immediately criticized from all sides. The Legal Aid Society called it “unconscionable and unworkable.” The correction officers union called it a “reckless and knee-jerk solution” and said the mayor should resign.


“The plan is deeply inadequate,” said State Senator Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Other elected officials agreed. Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, said on Monday that he feared a catastrophe like the Attica prison revolt in 1971 could soon occur at Rikers.
Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, said he feared that the conditions inside the jail could lead to a revolt.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times


The suspensions threatened by the mayor would go only so far. Had the plan been in place in August, only 3.5 percent of the more than 2,670 officers who were either out sick or otherwise unable to work with detainees that month would have been considered absent without approval and subject to suspension.

In interviews, detainees, jail staff members and medical workers said the situation at the jail complex was worsening with each passing day.

Some units that were once secured by up to four correction officers now have none, as nearly a third of the department’s roughly 8,400 uniformed staff members are either out sick or otherwise not showing up for work. Gang members and other detainees have taken to managing the comings and goings of dozens of incarcerated people in jail dormitories, breaking up fights and administering medical care.

Mounds of trash line the hallways and staircases. Soap and cleaning products are often unavailable. Some units are without toilet paper; in others, worms inch out from drains. Many incarcerated people have not been outside in months and spend their hours in dorms without activities and services. The timing of meals — if they come at all — is unpredictable, a public defender said. The barbershop is closed. The medical clinic is backed up, a staff member said.

Fear and tension run high.

“We have no minimum standards whatsoever, no medical services, no recreation, no religious services or law and library services,” one detainee, Reginald Wiggins, 58, said in an interview. “We have not had an officer on this unit in three weeks. I am in fear of my life.”