NEW YORK (AP) — Investigators from federal agencies launched an “interagency operation” on Monday at the troubled lockup in New York City where Sean “Diddy” Combs is being held.
The investigators from the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office and other law enforcement agencies descended on the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the Bureau of Prisons said in statement to The Associated Press.
The law enforcement operation was “designed to achieve our shared goal of maintaining a safe environment for both our employees and the incarcerated individuals housed at MDC Brooklyn,” the agency said. Prison officials declined to provide specific details about the operation Monday morning.
The jail has faced increasing scrutiny over bad conditions, rampant violence and multiple deaths, and there has been a push by the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons to fix problems and hold perpetrators accountable.
Last month, federal prosecutors charged nine inmates in connection with a spate of attacks from April to August at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the only federal jail in New York City. The allegations detailed serious safety and security issues at the jail, including charges after two inmates were stabbed to death and another was speared in the spine with a makeshift icepick. A correctional officer was also charged with shooting at a car during an unauthorized high-speed chase.
Earlier this month, an inmate was charged in connection with a murder-for-hire plot that led to the death of a 28-year-old woman last December outside a New York City nightclub. According to prosecutors, the inmate used a contraband cellphone to orchestrate the plot from behind bars while awaiting sentencing for directing a different shooting years earlier.
The criminal charges offered a window into the violence and dysfunction that have plagued the jail, which houses about 1,200 people, including Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed FTX cryptocurrency exchange. The total is down from more than 1,600 in January.
In a statement on Monday, the Bureau of Prisons said its operation in Brooklyn had been planned in advance and there was “no active threat.”
The agency said it wouldn’t provide additional details about what exactly investigators were doing until the operation was complete “in an effort to maintain the safety and security of all personnel inside the facility and the integrity of this operation.”
The facility, in an industrial area on the Brooklyn waterfront, is used mainly for post-arrest detention for people awaiting trial in federal courts in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Other inmates are there to serve short sentences following convictions.
Those held at the Brooklyn jail have long complained about rampant violence, dreadful conditions, severe staffing shortages and the widespread smuggling of drugs and other contraband, some of it facilitated by employees. At the same time, they say they’ve been subject to frequent lockdowns and have been barred from leaving their cells for visits, calls, showers or exercise.