Jail Unions Acquire a Highly effective Supporter: The New Mayor

As just lately as final month, a federal monitor appointed to supervise enhancements on Rikers Island had described Ms. Townsend as “vital to the success of this reform effort shifting ahead,” lauding her competence in pursuing self-discipline circumstances towards officers who use pressure inappropriately, amongst different issues.

However the unions had come to detest her for that work specifically.

As deputy commissioner for intelligence, investigation and trials, she had additionally been answerable for reviewing sure allegations of sick go away abuse, together with an incident on Columbus Day wherein greater than a dozen correction officers at a Queens courthouse left in ambulances to keep away from being deployed to Rikers Island.

She was additionally scrutinizing an incident in August throughout which dozens of transport officers claimed that greater than 40 of their buses had been too damaged right down to drive, inflicting detainees to overlook court docket dates and creating additional dysfunction on Rikers and within the court docket system.

Pissed off, the unions launched an internet petition calling for Ms. Townsend’s firing, recording at the least 290 signatures. A video posted by the jail officers’ union over the summer season attacked situations within the jails and celebrated the resignation of the jails commissioner on the time, Mr. Schiraldi’s predecessor. It ended with the phrases “Who’s subsequent?” overlaid on photographs of 5 different directors, together with Ms. Townsend.

In December, Ms. Townsend mentioned, Mr. Molina requested her if she may eliminate the two,000 disciplinary circumstances, in a gathering first reported by The New York Day by day Information.

They agreed to fulfill once more in January, on Mr. Molina’s first Monday on the job. She was fired that day, informed by human assets that the “commissioner goes in a special path.” She mentioned she was escorted out of the division’s headquarters in Queens.

Ms. Townsend’s firing just isn’t the primary time correction officers have ousted a high division investigator who had made enemies of the jail unions. Below the de Blasio administration, in 2014, the Correction Division pressured the resignation of one other official who held a place much like Ms. Townsend’s, Florence Finkle.