A year before Penn graduate student Shannon Schieber was murdered by a serial rapist in 1998, the head of Philadelphia's police sex-crime unit was told to stop "writing off" rape complaints, a retired police chief inspector testified yesterday.
"If you have 20 rapes and you only have 12 on your screen, then you're not seeing the whole picture, the whole pattern," retired Chief Inspector Vincent R. DeBlasis told a federal civil jury in the trial of the lawsuit against the city by Schieber's parents.
Attorneys for Sylvester and Vicki Schieber contend the police practice of "downgrading" rape complaints led to officers' missing a pattern of four rapes committed from June through August 1997 by "Center City rapist" Troy Graves.
Because that pattern and the victims' description of Graves were not relayed to beat cops in Center City, the suit says, an officer released Graves when he was stopped Sept. 9, 1997, on the street near the scene of a reported prowler.
On May 8, 1998, Graves broke into Schieber's apartment in Center City. He raped and strangled the 23-year-old, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
DeBlasis was the main witness during the first day of testimony in the trial of the Schiebers' lawsuit, detailing the police downgrading practice that he said had been "pervasive" since he began as a patrolman in 1959.
With rapes, DeBlasis testified, complaints were often downgraded to a "2701," a code for "investigation of a person."
A 2701 typically was not rigorously investigated and often was marked "inactive," he said, and did not appear in crime statistics reported to the FBI or in the advisories issued to patrol officers.
The Schiebers, of Chevy Chase, Md., are seeking $3.8 million in estimated future earnings of their daughter and a possibly greater amount for her suffering during her death struggle with Graves.
The lawsuit, which also seeks court-ordered changes in Philadelphia police training and policy, contends that Schieber's constitutional rights of equal treatment and due process were violated by the police practice of downgrading women's rape complaints and that the practice led to her death.
"If this were simply a case of the tragic death of a woman in Philadelphia, we wouldn't be here," Schieber attorney David Rudovsky told the 12 jurors in his opening statement yesterday. "We're here because the city, in large part, contributed to and caused the death of Shannon Schieber."
Jeffrey Scott, a divisional deputy city solicitor representing Philadelphia, called Rudovsky's case "20/20 hindsight."
"What happened to Shannon Schieber was, no doubt, devastating to her mother and father, family and friends and neighbors, and the city of Philadelphia," Scott said. "The city did not cause her death. Troy Graves did."
After his 2002 capture, Graves was convicted of attacking four Center City women in 1997; killing Schieber on May 7, 1998; and attacking a sixth Philadelphia woman in 1999. He resurfaced in Colorado in 2001 and attacked eight more young women. Graves has confessed to all the crimes and is serving a life sentence in Colorado.
DeBlasis testified about a 1997 call he made to Capt. Eileen Bonner, then head of the police Sex Crimes Unit, chastising her for the unit's downgrading of rape complaints.
"I told her that when women reported a rape, it has to be classified as a rape," DeBlasis testified. If the investigation created doubts about the complaints' validity, DeBlasis said he told Bonner, the complaint could later be recoded a 2701.
After Police Commissioner John F. Timoney came to Philadelphia in March 1998, DeBlasis said, Timoney ordered him to conduct an audit of 2,503 Sex Crimes Unit 2701 cases from 1995, 1996 and 1997.
DeBlasis said the audit showed that 142 cases were correctly coded, 351 were incorrectly coded, and 2,010 were ordered reinvestigated. He said 70 of the 351 incorrectly coded cases should have been coded as rapes or attempted rapes and 55 proved valid.
DeBlasis said the audit showed the department downgraded about 8.5 percent of serious crimes.
