Jails Officer Faked Suicide Prevention Training for 74 Guards, DA Says

NEW YORK — Amid a suicide crisis in New York City’s jails, a correction officer falsified records to show that scores of her peers had taken a suicide prevention course that they had not actually completed, Bronx prosecutors and the Department of Investigation said Friday.

The Rikers Island officer, Vinette Tucker-Frederick, was said by the Bronx district attorney’s office to have awarded credit for the course to 74 officers who were on leave in 2021. She gave their login information to colleagues and told them to take the digital training in the place of the absent officers, prosecutors said.

The Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark, said in a statement that Tucker-Frederick’s directions had resulted in the officers’ receiving credit “despite the fact that they weren’t even on Rikers Island.”

A nine-year veteran of the Department of Correction, Tucker-Frederick, 41, was charged with tampering with public records and identity theft, and has been suspended indefinitely without pay. Her lawyer, Peter C. Troxler, said she “adamantly maintains her innocence and has every expectation of being exonerated.”

The acts described by prosecutors came as the department was under pressure to remedy the growing crisis of suicide among incarcerated people, Clark said. At least 13 people are thought to have killed themselves in the jails since the beginning of 2021.

The rash of suicides that year coincided with mass absenteeism among correction officers that sent the long-troubled jail complex on Rikers Island into a spiral of violence and chaos. Without guards in key posts, conditions sharply deteriorated; New York lawmakers who visited described what they saw as a humanitarian crisis.

Rates of self-harm rose precipitously at that time. In August 2021, the court-appointed monitor who oversees conditions at Rikers, Steve J. Martin, wrote that there had been four suicides since December 2020 and expressed concern about “the adequacy of staff’s response.” Staff members acted slowly to confront emergencies, he noted.

Louis A. Molina, commissioner of the Department of Correction, said Friday that jail officials are working to improve conditions, and that corruption is unacceptable.

According to the department, all uniformed staff are trained in suicide prevention upon joining, and as of Friday, 68% had received a refresher course, up from 37% on Jan. 1.

“This act was the kind of egregious behavior that was tolerated in the past and has no place in this administration,” Molina said in a statement. “Suicide prevention training is critical for any public safety organization and especially for a correctional facility. We continue to push this important training to all of our employees and will hold everyone accountable.”

Clark, who is in a primary race against Tess Cohen, who has been critical of her oversight of Rikers, has announced three indictments related to the jail complex in recent days. Clark’s office indicted a former correction officer who is charged with accepting a $2,500 bribe to smuggle a cellphone to a detainee. It also charged four detainees with brutally beating another incarcerated person, lacerating his spleen, which needed to be removed.

Though Friday’s charges cover events said to have taken place during the last administration, the Department of Correction has continued to be criticized for lacking transparency. Recent reports from the federal monitor, Martin, have taken direct aim at the agency’s leaders, saying that violence within the city’s jails is unabated, while officials hide information.

“These problems have grave consequences for the prospect of reform and eliminating the imminent risk of harm faced by incarcerated individuals and staff,” Martin wrote this month.

In a recent episode flagged by the monitor, staff members waited 33 hours to report that a person being held at a Rikers Island facility had jumped from the upper tier stairway at his housing unit, landing on the floor at the bottom. The department did not immediately notify the monitoring team, Martin wrote, leaving them to first learn about the episode from news reports.

The man, Rubu Zhao, suffered a skull fracture and died at Elmhurst Hospital days later, according to internal jail records and six people with knowledge of the incident. Initially, jail staff reported that Zhao had jumped, but when medical staff members arrived, the jail officers said that he had slipped and fallen.

During a hearing this month, advocates for detainees at Rikers renewed their calls for a federal judge to strip Molina of his oversight power and to appoint a receiver to supervise the jails. The judge, Laura T. Swain, said that while she was not ready to hear arguments on that course of action, her faith in the city’s ability to manage its jails had been shaken.

After the hearing, she ordered jail officials to deliver timely, accurate information about deaths and other serious incidents on Rikers Island to Martin.

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<em>If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.</em>

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/nyregion/correction-officer-suicide-prevention.html">The New York Times</a>.