Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, January 25, 2001

Rape squad to get new quarters

Women's groups hailed the decision as a victory in their drive to make city police more accountable.

By Mark Fazlollah,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Philadelphia women's groups moved a step closer yesterday to seeing a new center established for the police rape squad, their latest success in the push for better treatment of sexual-assault victims.

Rick Tustin, acting director of the Capital Programs Office, told City Council's public safety committee that within six weeks, the city will select a new site for the police Special Victims Unit.

Tustin said that within 30 days, his office would select two or three of the best possible sites, and that "it shouldn't take any more than a week or two to come to a final decision."

Councilman Angel Ortiz, chairman of the committee, applauded the city's efforts to quickly develop a new site for aiding rape victims, one of the reforms launched in response to Inquirer articles showing that police wrongly mothballed thousands of sexual-assault complaints.

"The system is changing," Ortiz told members of several women's groups who attended the session. "And although it's not perfect, it's way, way better."

The organizations, led by the nonprofit Women's Law Project and Women Organized Against Rape, had demanded better quarters for the rape squad as one sign of physical change.

As part of Tustin's presentation, the Capital Program Office submitted a detailed report stating that the unit will need nearly three times as much space as it now has.

The unit occupies a brick building at the old Frankford Arsenal, a former military outpost ringed by stone walls and razor wire. To reach it, victims must pass a security check at the arsenal entrance before entering the squad's cramped quarters.

Once inside, they are seated in the overcrowded visitors' room, where handcuffed suspects often also wait. There is only one rest room for women and one for men.

Carol Tracy, director of the Women's Law Project, said she was pleased that a new site could be selected by March. "They're moving faster than we thought would happen," she said.

As part of yesterday's hearing, Police Commissioner John F. Timoney also presented Council with a detailed breakdown of a yearlong reinvestigation of 2,000 sexual-assault complaints that the rape squad wrongly shelved.

Timoney said 637 of the cases, dating to 1995, really were rapes. An additional 913 were less serious sexual assaults, he said. In addition to those crimes, the department's Quality Assurance Division had found 200 mothballed cases that it said should have been coded as rapes.

Thus far, police have arrested 83 suspects in cases that had been shelved, Timoney said.

"Those numbers, I assume, will increase," Timoney said. "It's a full-court press."

In its articles last year, The Inquirer reported that the sex-crimes unit had begun masking complaints from victims en masse almost from the time it was founded in 1981 - despite police pledges that the unit would be sensitive to the crime of rape.

In its early years, the squad "unfounded" - rejected as lies - almost half of its cases. When the FBI questioned that tactic, the unit began listing hundreds of cases yearly in noncrime classifications that kept them out of the city's crime tallies. Cases so classified often received little investigation.

Though the unit had routinely dumped cases for nearly two decades, Timoney ordered only cases as far back as 1995 reinvestigated because the statute of limitations on rape is five years.