Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson has so far issued three apologies for mistakes in the Fairmount Park rapist-murderer cases.
Those apologies add up to nothing. Meanwhile, an extremely dangerous criminal remains at large as it appears there's a bigger problem here than just a few police errors.
That problem is a Police Department that apparently still doesn't take sexual attacks against women seriously. The problem is that department blundering on these recent incidents suggests the same incompetence and indifference to rape cases that allowed another serial rapist and murderer, Troy Graves, to attack Center City women again and again in the late 1990s. He ultimately killed Penn student Shannon Schieber.
And just as the Center City rampage seems to be repeating itself this year in the park, so is the inexcusable police fumbling of the investigation.
In April, a 21-year-old woman was raped at knifepoint while jogging on Kelly Drive. Police did not alert the public.
In July, medical student Rebecca Park went jogging in West Fairmount Park; her raped and strangled body was found four days later, and DNA links her attacker to the April rape. Johnson apologized because his department didn't inform the public about the April rape.
Last Saturday, a 37-year-old woman jogging on West River Drive was attacked at knifepoint by a man whose description matches that of the suspect in the April attack.
The injured woman escaped and was driven to a Lower Merion hospital by a passersby. Police waited more than two hours before interviewing her - ample time for the attacker and any witnesses to disappear.
Here are the damning details:
Although a 911 call on the 6:15 p.m. attack came to police at 6:42 p.m., police didn't arrive to talk to the woman until 8:46 p.m. Why? Because two police district supervisors had an argument, with both insisting their districts weren't responsible for sending a squad car. The special investigations unit assigned to the Rebecca Park case wasn't brought in to investigate the scene of the latest attack until Monday - more than 36 hours after the assault occurred. How could that have happened?
Bear in mind, the Fairmount Park murderer-rapist is considered the most wanted criminal in Philadelphia right now. Yet police are acting like they're after a purse-snatcher.
Discipline should be meted out to the district supervisors who forgot their first duty is to citizens, not to their own staffing issues.
But an accounting of what went wrong doesn't stop there.
Johnson is failing a critical test of leadership if he can't get his department to make a priority of one of its most pressing cases. Mayor Street is failing women who use city amenities by saying, at a recent parks forum, that park security depends to a large extent not on police but on the "common sense" of park users. Is he saying the attacks are the victims' fault?
Besides, the woman who bravely fought off her attacker Saturday showed extreme common sense. It's her city that acted senselessly.
