A Snapshot of How Unions Forestall Progress

In December 2017, a federal monitor overseeing the City’s jail system touted a pilot program to equip 100 correction officers — and eventually every staffer who comes in contact with detainees — with body-worn cameras.

The cameras seemed like an obvious remedy, with much of the violence the consent decree was meant to stem happening behind closed doors and elsewhere, unseen by supervisors. “The monitoring team believes the additional video coverage will enhance the department’s ability to detect and prevent potential violence,” Steve Martin, the federal monitor in place since 2015, wrote in his fifth report.

It took at least three years, and it was resisted mightily by the unions representing jail officers, but there was a camera for just about every officer working in the City jails by around 2020. Then, in early May 2024, after a correction captain’s body-worn camera caught fire, Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie yanked all 3,500 cameras offline so the department could check them.

The review was supposed to take one to two weeks. But three months later, jail officials are still working to slowly get the cameras back online.

Martin and his team have questioned why it is taking the department so long to get them back online. To clarify: They have not blamed the unions for the latest delay. But for some veteran jail insiders, the ongoing camera kerfuffle is just one more reminder of how the union representing frontline correction officers initially used its political power to block seemingly obvious reforms. 

“They had big-time opposition to the cameras,” said Sarena Townsend, former head of the New York City Department of Correction Trials and Investigations Division who was pushed out when former commissioner Louis Molina took over in January 2022.

The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA) over the years has opposed everything from the mandatory use of slash-proof vests to a ban on cargo shorts which City investigators say can be used to smuggle contraband. The union has also strenuously opposed the use of body scanners to check officers as they entered jail facilities.

As for the body cameras, Townsend said COBA was initially concerned about the lack of training and clear new policy guidelines. “The union also did this for the new use-of-force directive,” she recalled. “They do that a lot to delay and prevent rollouts.”

The unions also spent more than a year working with the federal monitor and jail officials to draft a new so-called use-of-force directive. The unions argued that the rules are a mandatory subject of collective bargaining and must first be negotiated with the labor group before being implemented, according to the petition they filed with the City’s Board of Collective Bargaining.

The directive bans hits to the face unless there is no other option.

As for the body cameras, the union was also worried detainees would want to rip off the body cameras from officers during fights. That rarely happened, Townsend added.

Still, according to Townsend, the union opposition to the implementation had some merit. “The truth is there’s blame everywhere,” she said. “The department is pretty well-known for scrambling things together to placate politicians or advocates or the monitor without really giving a full training and informing their people.”

“And then the officers feel like they’re hung out to dry because they’re going to be held accountable for doing things wrong that they were never trained to do,” she continued. “It’s almost like you got to roll your eyes at both sides, because everybody is right and everybody is wrong.”

The initial rollout was at only one facility on Rikers and has never been fully operational with all officers wearing them, according to Townsend and the federal monitor. That’s in part because the department lacks enough camera backs to mount the small video devices onto the uniform shirts of the officers, according to the federal monitor and jail officials.

“Why weren’t there enough backings? Nobody has asked those kinds of questions. It’s like giving computers to someone who doesn’t have electrical power,” said Mary Lynne Werlwas, director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society.

On July 27, 2024, Martin also questioned why the Department of Correction (DOC) never bought enough backings and what has taken so long to finally take that step. “The effort to obtain additional backings remains quite protracted, but the department has reported it now has funding to ensure that each staff member can be assigned their own personal backing,” he wrote to Laura Taylor Swain, chief district judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Even as the supply of backings has increased, body-worn camera practices continued to falter as staff do not always wear or activate their body-worn cameras when required,” he added.

DOC officials declined to answer detailed questions about the cameras, their backings, the delayed rollout and lengthy effort to bring them back online. “The use of body-worn cameras by DOC officers is a crucial tool used to ensure the safety of those who live and work in our jails,” DOC spokesperson Latima Johnson said. “The cameras are also vital to ensuring public safety,” she added. “The department purchases the cameras on a rolling basis and will continue to explore new technology as it emerges.”

During a Sept. 10 Board of Correction hearing, Sherrieann Rembert, DOC’s bureau chief/chief of staff, said the department was bringing the body cameras back online for all staff. She noted there are 12,000 cameras already in place throughout the facilities on Rikers and officers also use handheld cameras to record potentially violent situations. 

DOC has already reissued 133 body-worn cameras to officers assigned to Rikers’ Rose M. Singer Enhanced Supervised Housing unit, 154 to the George R. Vierno Center, 200 to the transportation unit and 348 to the Robert N. Davoren Center. Still, Martin’s reports are filled with examples of officers using violence against detainees without turning the cameras on.

In December 2021, Martin and his team urged the department to equip its specialized Emergency Service Unit (ESU) officers with body cameras. ESU is a specially trained group of officers deployed when there is a major incident in jail. They have frequently been cited by Martin for using unnecessary excessive force and escalating incidents. “As many incidents involving ESU staff occur in locations that are not required to be covered by wall-mounted cameras and/or handheld video footage is difficult to obtain,” Martin’s report said. The court filing detailed how the cameras, which pick up audio, provide an added “value.”

“However, it is worth noting that the department and monitoring team continue to identify incidents where Staff fail to activate the BWC when required by policy,” the report said.

On July 10, 2023 a City correction officer used an illegal chokehold on a detainee who had his arms and legs shackled during a search inside the Brooklyn criminal courthouse, according to the monitor. The unnamed officer “received formal disciplinary charges for failing to turn on his body-worn camera,” Martin said, noting other charges related to the incident are pending.

COBA has a broad history of opposing new technology, said Martin Horn, who served as Correction Commissioner during the Bloomberg administration, from 2003 until 2009. When he first took over the department officers had been recently issued stab-resistant protective vests. But a lot of officers weren’t wearing them, Horn recalled.

“I issued an order where I said the vest is part of the uniform,” he said. “If we are spending the money to give it to you — you goddamn better wear it.” Former COBA president Norman Seabrook “got in my face about that,” Horn recalled, noting that officers were reluctant to wear the vests on hot days.

The unions typically oppose new changes even if they increase safety for officers, according to Horn. “Sometimes it’s shortsighted,” Horn said. “I also think it’s about wanting to be in control.”

It’s not just new technology where the union has asserted its power, according to Michael Jacobson, who headed DOC during the Giuliani administration. Since the pandemic, DOC has struggled to properly staff certain jails “in significant part due to influence and control from external forces, including COBA, the Correction Captains’ Association, and the Assistant Deputy Wardens / Deputy Wardens Association,” Jacobson wrote in a Nov. 15 court filing.

Jacobson and other reformers are urging Judge Swain to appoint a receiver to take over the long-troubled department.

“It is apparent to me that the threat and fear of extreme disruptive and retaliatory responses by uniformed staff and their representatives — including ‘sick-outs’ — to even relatively modest managerial decisions by the department, has served to chill effective decision-making by DOC leadership,” he wrote to Judge Swain.

That has played a major role in the department’s “inability to implement the difficult but necessary fundamental policy changes required to change the culture and environment,” he added.

Joshua Freeman, a labor historian and professor emeritus at Queens College, said some law enforcement unions, including COBA, have “accumulated extraordinary influence.” The union’s unlimited sick leave allowed officers to go on an informal strike throughout the pandemic, he said. But, he added, it’s unfair to blame COBA for decades of failed reforms at the City’s troubled jail system.

“I really feel like the Department of Correction, the Commissioner of Correction and the mayor ultimately are responsible,” he said. “And I think there’s been a kind of, at best, negligence and, at worst, malfeasance in thinking about the rights and the conditions that people who are being held on Rikers Island and the City detention facilities suffer through.”