Philadelphia Inquirer
Saturday, Feb. 21, 2004

Blunt words about police come back in suit against Phila.

By Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

In the years after Shannon Schieber's murder, then-Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney told the public that police had treated some rape victims in a "god-awful" way.

Timoney said the police sex-crimes unit had used a "stupid" code, one deployed to misclassify rapes as noncrimes.

And he said the unit had experienced a "systems failure."

Yesterday, a lawyer for Schieber's parents, suing the city over her 1998 sexual assault and murder, reminded Timoney of his blunt words about the performance of the police in investigating sex crimes.

Timoney, now Miami's police chief, unenthusiastically acknowledged his statements but sought to minimize them.

Sylvester and Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase, Md., are suing the city for at least $3.8 million and seeking changes in police training. They are contending in federal court that mistakes by the sex-crimes unit helped pave the way for the murder of their daughter. In particular, they blamed the unit for its hidden practice, since ended, of labeling sexual-assault victims as liars.

Shannon Schieber was killed in May 1998 by Troy Graves, a now-convicted serial rapist who had attacked four other women in Center City in 1997.

Investigators with the sex-crimes unit wrongly wrote off Graves' first two attacks as not being sex crimes.

The Schiebers say this "downgrading" of the crimes blinded beat officers and Center City women to Graves' escalating pattern of violence.

Timoney told the jury of six men and six women, all from the suburbs, how he ordered a massive reinvestigation of old sex-crimes cases after The Inquirer published critical articles in 1999.

The paper reported that the sex-crimes unit, right from its founding in 1981, had rejected the accounts of an unusual number of women victim as lies.

After the FBI complained, the unit quietly began putting about a third of its caseload every year into obscure noncrime classifications. This kept the cases out of crime statistics and made the unit's arrest rate seem far better than it actually was.

Timoney ordered a reinvestigation of such cases dating to 1995. He did not reopen earlier cases because the statute of limitations meant no one could be arrested for them.

The reinvestigation concluded that police had dumped 1,822 crimes, including 681 rapes. Belatedly, police arrested 62 men in connection with the reopened cases.

David Rudovsky, a lawyer for the Schiebers, showed Timoney an official police analysis that found that police had misclassified 24 percent of all rapes in the three years before Schieber's death.

In reopening cases, Timoney told jurors yesterday, police experts found some cases that had received proper investigations, even when misclassified as noncrimes.

"Then," he said, "there was a group that appeared to have no investigation at all."

After his testimony, Timoney told reporters that he rejected the central thrust of the Schiebers' case.

"I feel awful for the parents. But the issue is: Is the Police Department responsible?" he said. "I think that's a stretch."

The difficulty in stopping Troy Graves, Timoney said, was that Graves lay low after his initial flurry of attacks in 1997, waiting eight months before surfacing to strangle Schieber.

None of Graves' initial victims got enough of a look at him to provide a reliable description, Timoney added.

The trial, which began Feb. 11, is expected to go to the jury on Monday.