Nantasha M. Williams
Role at the time: New York City Council member for District 27 and sponsor of Int. 98-2024, at a Committee on Criminal Justice hearing
Statement summary
Council Member Nantasha Williams said deaths in custody follow a pattern, because each hand-off between precincts, jails, courts and hospitals makes the responsibility to provide care harder to track, harder to verify and easier to ignore.
“These may feel like isolated cases, but the patterns behind them are not. In New York City, our criminal legal system moves people consistently between precincts, jails, courts, and hospitals, and with each hand-off, the basic responsibility to provide care becomes harder to track, harder to verify and too easy to ignore.”
Official transcript of the Criminal Justice Committee's hearing on a bill to require medical clinics in city criminal court facilities.
Why we used this label
The reference point is whether the NYPD and the city are failing people who fall ill in police custody. Williams says each hand-off between precincts, jails, courts and hospitals makes the responsibility to provide care "harder to track, harder to verify and too easy to ignore." That faults how the system cares for people in custody, so we labeled it Condemned. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, which would fit support for a narrow fix alone; she describes a pattern of failure.