Louis Molina, Head of NYC’s Troubled Jails, Is Named Deputy Mayor for Safety

New York City’s embattled jails commissioner will be moved to another position in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration after a tenure in which his failure to reverse the chaos and violence at the Rikers Island complex raised the possibility of a federal takeover.

The commissioner, Louis A. Molina, will become the assistant deputy mayor for public safety, and will report to Philip Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, the administration announced in a news release. Mr. Adams characterized the move as a promotion.

A City Hall spokesman said Mr. Molina would stay in his current job until mid-November and that the administration was not yet prepared to announce a successor.

Mr. Molina was appointed by Mr. Adams and took office in January 2022, when the perennially troubled Correction Department was at its lowest point in nearly a decade. Mass absenteeism among correction officers had led to anarchy within the eight Rikers jails and the deaths of 16 people within the system.

Mr. Molina vowed to turn things around, saying that he would bring back staff members and reduce violence. He made an important alliance with the federal monitor who oversees conditions in the jails, Steve J. Martin. In October 2022, Mr. Martin praised Mr. Molina, saying the city could turn around conditions at Rikers thanks to the new chief’s “courage” and “creativity in his approach to solving decades-old problems.”

But 19 people died that year in city jails or immediately after being held there. And Mr. Molina took steps to limit public reporting of the deaths. The department stopped alerting the media when detainees died, and the commissioner cut off a watchdog agency’s access to video from the jails.

In one instance, according to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Molina told subordinates to ensure that a dying man named Elmore Robert Pondexter was kept “off the department’s count.” The direct involvement of the city’s top correction official appeared to show the lengths to which Mr. Molina was willing to go to keep the death figures down.

This year, the relationship between Mr. Molina and Mr. Martin fell apart, with Mr. Martin publicly criticizing Mr. Molina for a lack of transparency.

In several reports, Mr. Martin described episodes that Mr. Molina had asked be hidden from a federal judge who oversees the jails thanks to the settlement of a class-action suit brought on behalf of detainees in 2012. The incidents included the violent restraint of a person older than 80 and the beating of a detainee by other prisoners that left the victim naked for hours.

The judge, Laura T. Swain, said at the time that the incidents had rattled her faith in the city’s leadership, and in August, she opened the door to stripping the city’s control of the jail system. Such a move would be a blow to Mr. Molina and Mr. Adams, both of whom have insisted that the city can best oversee the jails. Both men have aligned themselves with the powerful correction officers’ union.

Mr. Molina had been seeking other senior law enforcement positions for more than a month, and had applied for at least one outside the administration, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Molina had also tried to submit his resignation in recent months, but the administration rejected his effort, two people said.

In the statement announcing Mr. Molina’s new role, the mayor praised his tenure as commissioner, saying he had brought the department “back from the brink of collapse.”

“Over the last 22 months, Lou has demonstrated exceptional leadership and dedication as the commissioner of the Department of Correction, helping to reverse decades of mismanagement and neglect,” Mr. Adams said.

Elizabeth Glazer, who led the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice under Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that with the change in leadership, the administration needed to focus on improving conditions at Rikers Island.

“The most urgent need in the administration right now is to get good governance in corrections and to fix the issues that have been getting worse and worse around brutality, transparency, supervision and accountability — all of the deficiencies that have led to the high rates of violence,” Ms. Glazer said.

Ms. Glazer warned that “moving the commissioner another step removed from running the department doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.”

Mr. Molina, a former New York City police officer, has had a varied history in city government, working as an adviser to the homelessness services department and as a leader of the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s enforcement division.

In 2018, he was named first deputy commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Correction, where he helped end federal monitoring by satisfying an agreement with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

His clashes with Mr. Martin contrasted sharply with that history, and continued in the days before the mayor announced Mr. Molina’s new role. On Friday, the monitor made an emergency request that Judge Swain order the city and the department to turn over a letter Mr. Molina had written early in his tenure.

The contents of the letter were not immediately clear, but Mr. Martin’s tone was unambiguous.

“The commissioner and other defendants appear to be engaged in a concerted effort to interfere with the work of the monitor and his team,” Mr. Martin wrote.

He continued, describing conditions in the jails as “unsafe, dangerous, and chaotic.”

”The focus of the defendants and the monitoring team must be on addressing the imminent risk of harm to incarcerated individuals and staff in the jails,” he wrote, chastising Mr. Molina and the city for consuming an inordinate amount of time “hiding information from the monitor.”