NEW YORK CITY, NY –
On September 11, 2001, New York City correction officers were ordered to keep the jails operating as the city’s emergency system buckled. Some Rikers Island emergency-service officers did more than hold the line. They went toward lower Manhattan.
Corrections1 reports that Rikers Emergency Services Unit Captains and officers traveled toward Ground Zero after the attacks. They searched by hand through the night and returned for another long shift the next morning, while other Department of Correction employees helped evacuate civilians, move supplies, establish communications and support recovery operations.
The work was largely outside the public spotlight. More than 1,000 uniformed and civilian DOC employees ultimately took part in the response, according to the department’s account. The agency still had to keep city jails running while its personnel were deployed to the disaster zone.
That dual obligation is the accountability story. Public safety depended on workers who were sent into danger and on a corrections system that continued to operate for people in custody. The record also raises a question that remains relevant 25 years later: how should New York recognize and care for public employees whose exposure to the recovery site changed their health and shortened their lives?
The annual Rikers memorial now carries that history forward. Its message, “We were there … We remember,” places correction staff inside the city’s 9/11 record, not at its margins.
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