The unit that investigates child abuse is understaffed and in need of additional training, according to a local advocate who is scheduled to discuss the matter with the police commissioner next week.
"It's grossly understaffed, unacceptably understaffed," Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project, said yesterday of the Special Victims Unit, which handles sex-crimes and child-abuse investigations.
Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said yesterday that he had been examining staffing levels in the Special Victims Unit and that he planned to send up to 20 additional detectives to the unit in the coming months.
Concerns about the Special Victims Unit erupted among women's advocates, and within the department, after the Sept. 9 slayings of Jennifer K. Foster, 37, and her daughter, Nikea Goldsby, 16, inside their South Philadelphia home.
The two had reported that Goldsby had been raped by her father, Ronald Goldsby, but at least two weeks passed before a Special Victims investigator was assigned to the case.
Furthermore, in the days before the murders, Foster repeatedly called police for help and obtained a protection-from-abuse order, saying she was fearful of her estranged husband.
Police told Foster to bring her daughter to speak with investigators at the Frankford Arsenal in Northeast Philadelphia, where the Special Victims Unit is based, but the pair had no way to get there, authorities have said. A counselor was scheduled to give them a ride to the Frankford Arsenal on Sept. 9, the day their bodies were found.
Ronald Goldsby, 43, a parolee who had been living in a halfway house, has been charged with the murders.
"I can't look at this case without seeing system failure all over the place," Tracy said. "I can't believe that these deaths could not have been prevented."
Johnson has said that officers did nothing wrong in the case and that police could not have prevented the deaths.
Today in City Council, Councilman Angel Ortiz plans to introduce a resolution calling for an investigation into how city agencies handle abuse complaints.
"We should look into how DHS [the Department of Human Services] and the Police Department and the District Attorney and the Sheriff's Office and the Department of Health work, and see how these programs are working," Ortiz said.
Shortly after the killings, Chief of Detectives John Maxwell reassigned the lead investigator in the case, Denise O'Malley, to the Gun Permit Unit. The move was not disciplinary, but to help O'Malley relieve the stress caused by the murders, Maxwell said.
Johnson, however, almost immediately rescinded the move, placing her back in Special Victims. He said that she had handled the case properly and that he was concerned the move would stigmatize her.
After much criticism of the Special Victims Unit in the late 1990s, then-Police Commissioner John F. Timoney reformed the squad, appointing a new commander and adding dozens of detectives. The new detectives were assigned to handle a backlog of sex-crimes complaints, but the child-abuse unit did not benefit from the changes, officials said. Many of those detectives have since gone on to other assignments.
When Johnson took over as commissioner this year, he assured Tracy and other advocates he remained committed to improving the unit.
Tracy said it is imperative that staffing within the child-abuse unit increase and that officers assigned there receive special training to investigate such cases.
"They get very little training at the academy, and the rest they learn on the job," Tracy said.
