National

NYC Jail Guards Use of Force a Record in 2014

Published

10 years ago

January 14, 2015

In this Dec. 17, 2014 file photo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, center left, meets with youth offenders as Acting Deputy Commissioner of Youthful Offenders, Adult Programming and Community Partnerships Winette Saunders-Halyard, center, and Department Correction Commissioner Joe Ponte, right, look on, at Second Chance Housing which serves as alternative housing for incarcerated adolescents on Rikers Island in New York. (AP Photo/The Daily News, Susan Watts, Pool, File)

JAKE PEARSON, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City jail guards reported more use of force against inmates in 2014 than ever before — an average of 11 incidents a day ranging from pepper sprayings to punches — amid heightened scrutiny from federal prosecutors to clean up what they call a “deep-seated culture of violence.”

Figures obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press via a public records request show correction officers reported using force 4,074 times last year, including 406 incidents alone in September, the month after a scathing federal report that said Rikers Island guards too often resorted to force against teenage inmates.

“There has clearly not been a commitment to date to address officer violence on Rikers Island,” said Dr. Bobby Cohen, a member of the jail oversight board who alluded to the record rates at a public meeting Tuesday. “Will that change now? I hope so. I’ve certainly not seen that before.”

The figures come the same day federal prosecutors, who have since sued to speed up the pace of reforms at Rikers, begin three days of negotiations with city lawyers and correction officials over specific language on use-of-force policy, investigations and other jail problems.

Federal prosecutors declined to comment on the data. A jail spokesman said in a statement that city Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte has a zero tolerance for excessive force and is updating the department’s use-of-force policy, improving staff training, expanding the investigation division and installing security cameras. He said those efforts and others likely will result in fewer incidents in the coming months.

Officers are required to fill out use-of-force forms every time there’s a confrontation with inmates, including when they are separating two or more inmates fighting each other. The data include the entire range of incidents from minor to serious use of force but don’t describe what happened in each case.

Use of force ranges from so-called Class C incidents such as pepper sprayings that result in minor to no injuries, to Class B incidents such as bruises and swelling that can be treated with over-the-counter care, to Class A incidents such as broken bones and deep cuts that require hospitalization.

Norman Seabrook, who heads the powerful 9,000-member Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said the rise in reported incidents was likely attributable to guards documenting more often than they did previously in an effort to cover themselves from potential lawsuits and discipline, even if they’re legitimately defending themselves from attacks.

“If I physically touch an inmate, it’s a use of force irrespective of an injury happening,” he said. “Absolutely we’re saying, ‘Document everything. Don’t physically get into an altercation but use chemical agents. Spray them. Spray everybody you’ve got to spray but don’t punch nobody out. Just spray whoever you’ve got to.'”

But inmate advocates and others point to the scathing August review by federal prosecutors that described a “deep-seated culture of violence” at Rikers, finding that guards regularly used physical force against 16- 17- and 18-year-old inmates often for perceived slights and signs of disrespect. The report said that behavior likely held true in all of the 10 facilities on Rikers, a massive jail complex in the East River that holds an average of nearly 11,000 inmates a day on charges ranging from trespassing to murder.

One such incident occurred last month, the week before a visit from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to reform the nation’s second-largest jail system, according to an attorney for inmate Ambrorix Celeeomio.

Celeeomio, 18, who is being held on a gang assault charge, was pepper sprayed, punched and kicked by guards December 9 in a Rikers cafeteria without cameras after getting into an argument with a jail guard, according lawyer Jenay Nurse, who heads The Bronx Defenders’ Adolescent Defense Project. She said Celeeomio, who has an IQ of 65 and is cognitively delayed, was rushed to a Rikers clinic covered in blood.

A city official, who wasn’t authorized to speak about the incident, confirmed that Celeeomio was involved in the use-of-force with at least two correction officers that day.

The data also show use-of-force rates have increased steadily in the past eight years even as the overall inmate population has declined. Guards reported 3,285 uses of force in 2013 when the inmate population averaged 11,687. There were 1,299 reports in 2006 when there were nearly 14,000 inmates.

Plaintiff’s attorneys and others have long argued the city jails are consumed by violence and the AP reported last year based on a health department study that a third of inmates who said their visible injury resulted from a confrontation with jail guards suffered a blow to the head.

Inmate slashings and stabbings have also increased from a low of 19 incidents in 2007 to 93 last year, according to the data. But they’re down from a high of 1,552 incidents in 1990 when the jail population was 20,207 inmates.

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Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

Published

2 days ago

December 26, 2024

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To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Activism

OPINION: “My Girl,” The Temptations, and Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame. The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.” That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

Published

4 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Nikki Giovanni. Courtesy of Nikki-Giovanni.com

By Emil Guillermo

The Temptations, the harmonizing, singing dancing man-group of your OG youth, were on “The Today Show,” earlier this week.

There were some new members, no David Ruffin. But Otis Williams, 83, was there still crooning and preening, leading the group’s 60th anniversary performance of “My Girl.”

When I first heard “My Girl,” I got it.

I was 9 and had a crush on Julie Satterfield, with the braided ponytails in my catechism class. Unfortunately, she did not become my girl.

But that song was always a special bridge in my life. In college, I was a member of a practically all-White, all-male club that mirrored the demographics at that university. At the parties, the song of choice was “My Girl.”

Which is odd, because the party was 98% men.

The organization is a little better now, with women, people of color and LGBTQ+, but back in the 70s, the Tempts music was the only thing that integrated that club.

POETRY’S “MY GIRL”

The song’s anniversary took me by surprise. But not as much as the death of Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame.

The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.”

That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

I’ll always see her as the Black female voice that broke through the silence of good enough. In 1968, when cities were burning all across America, Giovanni was the militant female voice of a revolution.

Her “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” is the historical record of racial anger as literature from the opening lines.

It reads profane and violent, shockingly so then. These days, it may seem tamer than rap music.

But it’s jarring and pulls no punches. It protests Vietnam, and what Black men were asked to do for their country.

“We kill in Viet Nam,” she wrote. “We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US.”

Written in 1968, it was a poem that spoke to the militancy and activism of the times. And she explained herself in a follow up, “My Poem.”

“I am 25 years old, Black female poet,” she wrote referring to her earlier controversial poem. “If they kill me. It won’t stop the revolution.”

Giovanni wrote more poetry and children’s books. She taught at Rutgers, then later Virginia Tech where she followed her fellow professor who would become her spouse, Virginia C. Fowler.

Since Giovanni’s death, I’ve read through her poetry, from what made her famous, to her later poems that revealed her humanity and compassion for all of life.

In “Allowables,” she writes of finding a spider on a book, then killing it.

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

For Giovanni, her soul was in her poetry, and the revolution was her evolution.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and solo performer. Join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Book Review: In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World

It’s a tale of heroes: the Maroons, who created communities in unwanted swampland, and welcomed escaped slaves into their midst; Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”; Marème Diarra, who walked more than 2000 miles from Sudan to Senegal with her children to escape slavery; enslaved farmers and horticulturists; and everyday people who still talk about slavery and what the institution left behind.

Published

4 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Book cover. Courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Ever since you learned how it happened you couldn’t get it out of your mind.

People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels.

You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…”

Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish.

It’s a tale filled with irony. Says one contributor, early American Colonists held enslaved people but believed that King George had “unjustly enslaved” the colonists.

It’s the story of a British company that crafted shackles and cuffs and that still sells handcuffs “used worldwide by police and militaries” today.

Today, discussions about cooperation and diversity remain essential.

Says one essayist, “… embracing a view of history with a more expansive definition of archives in all their forms must be fostered in all societies.”

Unless you’ve been completely unaware and haven’t been paying attention for the past 150 years, a great deal of what you’ll read inside “In Slavery’s Wake” is information you already knew and images you’ve already seen.

Look again, though, because this comprehensive book isn’t just about America and its history. It’s about slavery, worldwide, yesterday and today.

Casual readers – non-historians especially – will, in fact, be surprised to learn, then, about slavery on other continents, how Africans left their legacies in places far from home, and how the “wake” they left changed the worlds of agriculture, music, and culture. Tales of individual people round out the narrative, in legends that melt into the stories of others and present new heroes, activists, resisters, allies, and tales that are inspirational and thrilling.

This book is sometimes a difficult read and is probably best consumed in small bites that can be considered with great care to appreciate fully. Start “In Slavery’s Wake,” though, and you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, Author: Various Contributors, c.2024, Smithsonian Books, $39.95