Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he is committed to closing Rikers Island, which is legally mandated to shut its doors by August of next year.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, he tapped Dana Kaplan as the city\u2019s new \u201cclose Rikers czar\u201d to orchestrate the closure of the jail complex and oversee the construction of four new borough-based jails near courthouses.<\/p>\n
She joined NY1 political anchor Errol Louis on \u201cInside City Hall\u201d to talk about the role.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, under the last administration, we did not see the type of prioritization or urgency to close Rikers Island that was required to move this plan ahead. And so I think where we are right now is a result of that,” she said. “That\u2019s why I\u2019d say it\u2019s pretty exciting that Mayor Mamdani has appointed me as the \u2018close Rikers czar\u2019 to essentially work with all of the different city leaders and agencies that are going to be responsible executing this plan to move it ahead as quickly as absolutely possible.”<\/p>\n
Tap the video player above to watch the interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he is committed to closing Rikers Island, which is legally mandated to shut its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[378,25,377,379,9,24,12,63,122,124,123,380,27,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-213551","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-app-inside-city-hall","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-inside-city-hall-segments","11":"tag-inside-city-hall-shows","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-queens","17":"tag-queens-headlines","18":"tag-queens-news","19":"tag-spectrum-news-staff","20":"tag-top-stories","21":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}