Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney acknowledged that the police rape squad had “improperly” and “for years and years” kept some sexual-assault cases out of the city’s crime statistics, a practice that cut short investigations. During a City Council hearing, Timoney responded in detail for the first time to disclosures that the Special Victims Unit had buried thousands of cases since the early 1980s. About 30% of the sex-crimes unit’s caseload was shunted into a bureaucratic limbo called “investigation of person” from 1984 to late 1997. Timoney offered no estimate of how many cases were buried over the years, or how many could have led to arrests and prosecution had they been handled properly.
The department is reexamining about 5,000 cases put in noncriminal categories such as “investigation of person” or deemed “unfounded”—groundless—over the last five years. So far this year, police have rejected rape complaints as “unfounded” at a much lower rate than they did in 1998. Last year, the sex-crimes unit rejected as “unfounded” 18% of all the rape complaints it received. During the first 11 months of 1999, 8% of complaints were rejected.
In an interview after the Council hearing, he said some of the 1998 “unfounded” cases were rapes and should have been classified as such. He said they had been misclassified because of “stupid errors.”
The five-hour hearing was prompted by Inquirer articles documenting that the sex-crimes unit buried thousands of complaints. Cases deposited in “investigation of person” typically got no investigation, the newspaper found. The victims usually had no idea their cases had been shelved.
The practice permitted the unit to report one of the nation’s highest arrest rates for rape—a rate that a Villanova University law professor yesterday termed “impressive, although entirely fabricated.”
Before and after Timoney’s appearance, the Council panel heard from an array of women’s advocates, criminologists, law professors, rape prosecutors and others - many of whom had stinging remarks about how the city has been treating sexual-assault victims.
Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project, said the sex-crimes unit had often viewed victims with suspicion, focusing on their past intimacy with their attackers or on personal problems with drugs or alcohol.”These are the primary types of cases where the Philadelphia Police Department has let women down,” Tracy said.
Among the sharpest criticism came from Michelle J. Anderson, who teaches criminal law at Villanova University. “To hide rape complaints in administrative dead zones, as the Philadelphia Police Department has done, represents extraordinary cowardice and manipulation,” Anderson said. “Who knows how many of the 2,000 women in 1996 and 1997, for instance, whose rapes were ignored as ‘investigation of person’ would have called City Council, lobbied for reform or otherwise attempted to correct the situation—had they actually been told that the [police] did not believe their complaints were true?” she asked.
Timoney took issue with a chart The Inquirer published Oct. 17 showing that Philadelphia’s rate of “unfounding” rape complaints in 1998 was the highest of the nation’s 10 largest cities. Timoney said two of the cities listed—Dallas and San Antonio—had higher rates than Philadelphia. A recomputation yesterday by The Inquirer found that Dallas and San Antonio had slightly higher “unfounded” rates than were shown on the chart but Philadelphia’s rate was still the highest. [The Inquirer, 12/7/99]
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