City corrections officers are being trained to subdue prisoners with eye gouges, elbow strikes to the head and other facial blows — moves that go against an agreement with the feds, The Post has learned.
Mayor Bill de Blasio reached a pact with Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara last year that settled a federal lawsuit aimed at curbing widespread violence at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex.
As part of the deal, the city agreed to a long list of reforms that included prohibiting correction officers from striking unruly inmates in the head except in rare, life-threatening situations.
But combat training is being provided to members of the Department of Correction’s Emergency Services unit by Virginia-based US Corrections-Special Operations Group as part of a three-year, $1.2 million contract inked in March — and it appears to go against the spirit of the agreement.
“Their catchphrase during the training was ‘Break the jaw and walk away,’ ” said an Emergency Services Unit member who went through the program this summer.
“A lot of us where like, ‘What the heck?’ They were demonstrating eye gouges, elbow and arm strikes to the head. We all knew what they were teaching goes everything we were ever taught in our academy.”
When told of the combat training, a former top DOC official added, “If that is in fact what’s being taught, it contradicts the [Rikers] settlement and all prior settlements where the goal was to eliminate the use of head shots.”
The DOC insisted to The Post that US C-SOG “does not train in hand-to-hand combat.”
But four department sources said US C-SOG team leader Joseph Garcia and his band of special-ops private contractors promoted head blows as typical self-defense techniques while hosting training sessions in broad daylight at Rikers Island.
The ESU source said he took three of the combat training classes offered during the summer with at least 30 others in his 198-member unit.
Each class was held in an “open air” area behind an ESU compound on Rikers Island, where US C-SOG from May through last week parked a massive military-style trailer filled with more than 40 rifles, shotguns and handguns and various types of ammunition, DOC sources said.
Garcia and his team cavalierly roamed around Rikers carrying loaded firearms, sources said. When asked if the company had proper permits for the weapons, DOC claimed that no loaded weapons were brought onto the island by the company, only inert training weapons.
Garcia and US C-SOG did not return messages.
Last month, The Post reported US C-SOG also trained ESU officers with pellet-firing shotguns at Rikers. The Kel-Tec shotguns, which can also fire regular ammunition, are a stark departure from current techniques used by the ESU, which normally defends city jails with batons, pepper spray and shields with a taser-like electric current.
A DOC spokesperson defended the training, saying it “furthers our efforts to modernize our [ESU] to ensure that they learn the best practices and have the tactical skills to respond to dangerous situations safely and quickly, whether in the jails or in the city at large.”