NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton on Friday dismissed City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s pitch to shut down Rikers Island as “political rhetoric” and “a lot of hot air” in a radio interview.
“It sounds nice. Let’s close Rikers Island. Do you want to put a jail beside your house in Staten Island or in Queens or in Manhattan? We’re already having a problem with homeless shelters that people are concerned with. So who wants to house 10,000 prisoners in their neighborhood?” Bratton scoffed on John Gambling’s show, “The Answer.”
During a wide-ranging, soft-on-crime State of the City speech earlier this month, Mark-Viverito called for the eventual closing of the 84-year-old prison complex, calling conditions there inhumane.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo praised the idea after Mayor Bill de Blasio said it wasn’t feasible — but Friday was the first time the Big Apple’s top cop weighed in, and his was the harshest criticism yet of the speaker’s pie-in-the-sky plan.
“Let’s get real. You’d have to spend billions of dollars to do it, to expand staff to accommodate smaller facilities. Rikers Island is big enough to accommodate redesign,” Bratton said.
The commissioner pointed out that the inmate population at Rikers today is far lower than in the past.
“Keep in mind also Rikers has almost half the population we had in the 1990s. In the 1990s we had on average almost 22,000 prisoners and now we’re at 10,000 to 9,000. This island is not overcrowded. What you have is a lot of unfortunately in many instances very dangerous people, and you want to take them off an island away from everybody and put them in a neighborhood?” he asked incredulously.
There’s no way the prison will be closed, despite Mark-Viverito’s and Cuomo’s backing of the idea, he added.
“The proposals that are being advanced, let’s close Rikers, they’re not going to fly. It’s not going to happen. What’s going to happen is what the mayor’s doing, trying to reorganize the facility, try to get a handle on some of the violence,” he said.
New Yorkers, he added, would never stand for prison facilities to be built in their neighborhoods — and a virtually escape-proof island is exactly the place to house predators who prey on citizens.
“It’s just a reminder there are some very violent people on that island. You want to house them in neighborhoods around the city? I don’t think so. I don’t think the public’s interested in it,” he said. “It sounds nice no matter who is advancing the idea. But a lot of this is a lot of political rhetoric, a lot of hot air, basically.”
Bratton was also noncommittal when Gambling asked about Mark-Viverito’s controversial scheme to void about 700,000 warrants for quality-of-life violations, including urinating and drinking in public.
“I have not seen details specific to her proposal. We’ll be more than happy to sit down and discuss it. I have much more interest in contemporary actions and cases,” he said.
“So we’ll see how that discussion rolls out in the next couple of months, but right now it’s in the proposal stage.”
Cuomo ripped de Blasio on Wednesday and called Rikers “a terrible and ongoing injustice” after the mayor a day earlier said the jail would cost billions to close.