De Blasio Visits Rikers After Weeks Of Pressure

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio finally bowed to pressure to visit Rikers Island and see firsthand what elected officials and advocates call a "humanitarian crisis."

But after de Blasio's tour Monday he spoke little about conditions that sparked a weeks-long crisis beyond saying they upset him.

Instead, de Blasio concentrated on steps his jail and health care officials had taken to alleviate the situation.

“The mission for me today was to come and see these specific changes that are being made to address the immediate problem,” he said.

“The bottom line is all these things have to happen immediately: fewer inmates, faster intake, a better, more-secure health care situation and getting back to work the folks who have not been working,” he said.

The tour was preceded by weeks of political pressure on de Blasio, including that day when congressional Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on him to brief Congress about Rikers, the New York Times reported.

De Blasio resisted the calls and all but dismissed a visit as political theater. He relented last week and pledged to visit Rikers, but did not give a precise date.

Word about the visit came Monday afternoon in an email informing reporters that they'd be excluded for the tour — and giving them roughly two hours notice before an in-person news conference.

De Blasio said during the news conference that intake facilities have been cleaned up and the process sped up from 24 hours to 10 hours.

The jail currently has 5,655 inmates, de Blasio said earlier Monday.

The inmate population is below the 6,000 people who were in the jail during August, he said.

“We believe in the coming weeks we’ll be able to get this number under 5,000,” he said earlier Monday.

De Blasio said the long-term solution is completing a plan to close Rikers.