About 750 bodies are still stored, awaiting burial, from April 2020’s swamping of New York City’s morgues. They are in large refrigerated trucks by the Brooklyn waterfront. Many of the families of the deceased simply cannot afford to bury their relatives and have requested the city to bury them on Hart Island, the potter’s field for the city. When morgues and funeral homes became overwhelmed in March 2020, the city arranged for refrigerated trucks to serve as a makeshift morgue on the 39th Street Pier in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
Other signs of poverty and breakdown abound.
At the Rikers Island jail, 1,901 detainees at the Anna M. Kross Center, many with severe mental health issues, were put on lockdown for all of May 2, due to a lack of correctional officers. The situation was exacerbated because an unusually high number of officers called in sick. Morale is low, many officers are single parents, the jail unions say that management puts undue pressure on the officers, and violent episodes of inmates regularly put officers in difficult decision-making situations. Further, with more officers calling in sick, management has pushed the remaining ones to sometimes work triple or quadruple shifts. On May 2, last Sunday, 49 officers worked triple or quadruple shifts. In April 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to end the practice, but the city’s vow in April 2021 to hire 400 more officers has yet to be realized.
