Disband COBA (aka Corrupt Officers Bureau of Alibis)!

Donny Ubiera died on August 23, 2023 on Rikers Island. The official story is he was found unresponsive in his cell at 5:15 am and received medical care, including administering Narcan to reverse drug overdose. According to people housed in the same detention unit, officers didn’t respond to his pleas for medical assistance hours before. He was seen nodding off outside his cell before lockdown at 9pm, and around 1:30am was heard gasping for air, unable to breathe, and calling for help, banging on his cell door. The guards ignored him. Unit 13B of GRVC on Rikers, where Donny died, is a mental health observation unit that requires guards to make rounds every 15 minutes to check on inmates, housed there in part for their potential suicide risk. Donny wasn’t found until after the cell doors were unlocked at 5am and medics didn’t arrive for another hour. The prisoner that reported this to investigators and to the media was threatened by guards for speaking out.

Donny’s death is part of a pattern. There were 19 deaths on Rikers in 2021 and a total of 27 from the time Mayor Eric Adams took office in January 2022 through August 2023. This is the largest spike in deaths since the 1990s.

Why has Rikers increased in neglect and brutality over the last few years?

Rikers is being used to warehouse people with mental illness when they should be getting proper treatment. An outrageous 50% of the current average 5500+ inmates on Rikers have a mental health diagnosis, and 16% have a serious mental health diagnosis. This makes Rikers the largest mental health care facility in the country.

Rikers corrections officers not only have a reputation for brutality, but are also negligent of the people in their care. The Department of Corrections’ own report on causes of deaths in 2021 cites indifference by corrections officers through inmates’ missed medical appointments, lack of mental health screening and treatment, and neglect of required rounds to check on inmates. It also specifically highlights that guards ignore inmates’ pleas for help or signs of illness or distress, as was the case with Donny Ubiera.

The problem isn’t understaffing, it’s corruption

The corrections officers’ union—COBA—and city officials try to blame problems on Rikers on understaffing, but it’s the corrupt corrections officers that are to blame. They have been caught taking bribes to smuggle items into the jail, including phones, scalpels, and the very drugs that prisoners are overdosing from. And the reason Rikers jails are understaffed is that the corrections officers (COs) have taken advantage of an unlimited sick leave policy that COBA got put in place. COs have been known to call out for months to a year on paid sick leave while going on vacation, working other jobs, or, in one instance, doing home improvement projects. On Dec 31, 2021, approximately 2,500 out of 7,700 uniformed staffers claimed to be sick—this is a total of 1/3 of the staff calling out. All this corruption by COs is why we call their union, COBA, the Corrupt Officers Bureau of Alibis.

The widespread abuse of COs’ unlimited sick leave has led to a situation where entire housing units have been turned over to gangs to run and control, preying on fellow inmates. In one widely reported incident in 2021, the Trinitarios gang, running one housing unit, forced prisoners to fight each other for entertainment in fight clubs while the guards stood by doing nothing.

Why are they getting away with this?

The Jails Commissioner sets policies that govern how Rikers operates. While these policies are often inhumane towards prisoners, COs take it one step further and regularly violate these policies with impunity, and managers & supervisors look the other way or support them. Violence by COs against inmates got so bad that it sparked a federal monitor beginning in 2015, but COs keep getting away with brutality and corruption. Individual COs are protected by their union, COBA. When COs are investigated for violating policies, those investigations wind slowly through internal disciplinary procedures that result in nothing more than administrative reprimands like suspensions or fines. The rare time COs are fired or charged with a crime is when something makes the news. The supervisors & managers that turn a blind eye get promoted like former Commissioner Molina.

If anyone tries to hold COs accountable they are pushed out or fired. Former Rikers Deputy Commissioner Serena Townsend was fired by Molina on his first day on the job at the urging of COBA, because she refused to “get rid of” 2,000 pending discipline cases. In 2023, Molina announced that the NYC Dept. of Corrections no longer reports deaths and injuries to the media and stopped some reporting to the federal monitor. He also moved the “investigations” unit to directly report to him so he can directly control who and what is being investigated and reported.

This amounts to an outrageous cover-up of deaths, brutality, and neglect of inmates on Rikers by the Commissioner and COBA, with the backing of Eric Adams. According to Serena Townsend, the number one problem with Rikers jails is “Corruption. When I say corruption, I mean from…the union [COBA], which basically runs the place if you have a willing partner in the commissioner and mayor which you do now.”

The prison system in this country is used to lock up Black youth and other oppressed people targeted for repression. The Adams administration has ramped up arrests of mainly Black and Latino people in impoverished neighborhoods for low-level offenses like public alcohol use and littering, which will undoubtedly drive up the number of inmates on Rikers. While the conditions on Rikers have gotten so outrageous that it’s getting media coverage and performative outrage from politicians, we can’t rely on those in power to solve this problem. There has been a federal monitor of Rikers jails since 2015, and nothing has changed. If we want an end to the brutality and neglect on Rikers, we must stand up to Adams, Molina, and the COs and their corrupt union.

We demand:
No More Deaths on Rikers!
Disband COBA (the Corrupt Officers Bureau of Alibis)!

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Defend those who are persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for resisting injustice! Fight the frame-ups of Black and other oppressed people!
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