The correction commissioner at the time hailed the accomplishment at a City Council hearing and gave the men an award for their “exceptional efforts.” Within a month, both officials were promoted.
Then came the tip to Correction Department investigators: Violence wasn’t down. The data was wrong.
A dozen investigators eventually produced a confidential report, obtained by The New York Times, which concluded that hundreds of inmate fights had been omitted from departmental statistics; that the warden, William Clemons, and the deputy warden, Turhan Gumusdere, had “abdicated all responsibility” in reporting the statistics and that both should be demoted.
The series of events that followed, which extended into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and was pieced together by The Times through interviews and a review of internal agency documents, underscores the pervasive dysfunction of the city’s Correction Department.
The commissioner at the time, Dora B. Schriro, did not demote the men. Instead, she ordered the removal from the report of any implication that the pair were culpable, current and former officials said.
Then city officials provided only the sanitized report to the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which was conducting its own investigation into potential civil rights violations in the handling of teenage inmates at Rikers. As part of its investigation, the office had made repeated requests to the Correction Department for all relevant documents and asked, in particular, for any materials associated with audits or reviews related to violence by staff on adolescent inmates or between the inmates themselves.
The city’s failure to provide the original report, an omission that prosecutors were unaware of until it was discovered last week by The Times, raises questions about how forthcoming the agency was in responding to the federal inquiry. The omission could also have serious legal repercussions. In August, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney, released a scathing 79-page report on abuses at Rikers Island and gave the city until this week to agree to make significant changes, or face the prospect of being sued by the Justice Department. The Times’s discovery could complicate any negotiations between the two sides.
