Philadelphia Inquirer
Saturday, June 23, 2001

New home, fresh start for rape unit

Modern offices at Episcopal Hospital will greet the once-troubled squad.

By Craig R. McCoy, Mark Fazlollah, and Clea Benson
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

There are separate doorways to keep apart accused rapists and their victims, and a special room for child victims and their parents, with toys and children's books.

There is double the space for detectives. And there is no barbed wire.

These are among the pluses for the Philadelphia Police Department's sex-crimes unit now that the city has finally decided to move the squad from its ominous and overcrowded headquarters at the old Frankford Arsenal.

The city expects to spend as much as $1.2 million to renovate space on the grounds of Episcopal Hospital in Kensington for the squad. When the move is completed this fall, the Special Victims Unit will have gone from having one of the city's worst police facilities to perhaps the best.

The shift to four floors in a hospital building is the latest - and most expensive - change for a rape squad that has undergone a transformation.

"It's certainly more spacious," said Capt. Joseph M. Mooney, the unit's commander. "For the victims, it's a win."

Carol E. Tracy, director of the nonprofit Women's Law Center, which lobbied for the move, said the relocation tells sex-crime investigators that their difficult job is valued.

"We got everything from file cabinets to interview rooms to training facilities to a library," Tracy said.

For sexual-assault victims, a big positive change is that the police will be next to Episcopal's emergency room. Episcopal nurses with training in rape treated 379 sexual-assault patients last year. The hospital is one of two that the city pays to treat adult victims.

The move to the new facility was triggered by scandal.

After a furor over a botched investigation, newly appointed Police Commissioner John F. Timoney shook up the rape squad in 1998. He put Mooney, a tough onetime homicide and Internal Affairs investigator, in charge and, for the time, added detectives to the beat cops who made up the investigative force.

Reform gained momentum after The Inquirer published a series of articles in 1999 disclosing that the rape squad had, for two decades, secretly rejected thousands of complaints from women. Investigators labeled victims as liars or dumped their cases by classifying them as "noncrimes."

Timoney responded by appointing a task force to reinvestigate shelved cases dating back five years, the statute of limitations for rape. Final figures show that the police reexamined 3,119 cases and determined that 1,822 of them were crimes, including 681 deep-sixed rapes.

The Inquirer articles also spotlighted the unit's out-of-the-way headquarters at the old arsenal. There, suspects sometimes lined the hallway outside the grungy waiting room set aside for victims.

"It was necessary to move because of the inaccessibility of the unit, the intimidating environment, and the fact that victims had to again see their attackers," Carole J. Johnson, executive director of Women Organized Against Rape, said in a recent interview.

Since the rape squad's founding in 1981, it has been shunted from one decrepit office to another.

For the unit's first decade, home was a crumbling former schoolhouse in Port Richmond. Then, asbestos sent the squad packing across town to South Philadelphia, where, until the mid-1990s, officers worked out of a former park-police station notorious for an odor of horse manure.

The unit then crowded into one floor of a brick building in the arsenal, a former military compound still ringed by razor wire. Conditions there worsened as Timoney expanded the squad. It now has about 80 officers, up from 60 three years ago.

The new headquarters will occupy the basement and first three floors of the hospital's nine-story Tower Building, a Gothic structure built in 1933. The hospital, formally known as Temple University Hospital, Episcopal Division, is at Lehigh Avenue and Front Street.

Advocates for child sexual-assault victims are also considering moving to the building. They say there is room for both police and social workers to work there.

On June 14, City Council unanimously passed a bill giving city negotiators approval to sign a lease there. In all, the city will lease 16,000 square feet, twice as much as the current space, at $24,000 a year.

Harold Aponte, project director for the city's Capital Program Office, said architects have planned a total overhaul. Crews will tear down walls and install a bullpen area for detectives, cells and interrogation rooms. There will be an adult waiting room and a "child-safe and friendly" room for families, Aponte said.

Currently, police, suspects and victims use the same interview rooms and bathrooms. In the new headquarters, victims and prisoners will travel different routes inside.

"The two never shall meet," Aponte said. "Even the interview rooms are separate."

And the headquarters will be carpeted.

"We are trying to make this space very, very nice," Aponte said.

The new building will be a concrete manifestation of how much the police's approach to rape victims has changed.

In the last two years, a newly reenergized and larger rape squad has by far the largest increase in rate of arrests of any police unit - even as arrests citywide have increased under Timoney.

Detectives and other officers arrested 677 suspects last year - double the number in 1998.

In part, the arrest boom is due to 85 suspects collared as part of the reinvestigation of previously buried cases. Of those suspects, at least 17 have been convicted. Others are awaiting trial.

It is also clear that police are no longer dumping rape cases. Consider the boom in reported sex crimes in the city. In 1996, the rape squad reported that 1,500 women were raped or sexually assaulted in Philadelphia. Last year, the figure was 2,750 - an 83 percent jump.

Police and advocates say the increase does not reflect a rise in crime, but rather a willingness by police to believe more women who report being raped.

In 1998, the squad rejected as "unfounded" 18 percent of all rape complaints, the highest rejection-rate among large cities. Last year, it rejected only 8 percent.

In a step that drew national attention last year, Timoney permitted women's organizations and children's advocates to review sex-crime case files.

A coalition of groups, including lawyers from the Women's Law Project and staff of Women Organized Against Rape, has examined every complaint that the squad proposed to reject as "unfounded," as well as cases selected at random.

Johnson, of Women Organized Against Rape, reflected on the changes yesterday as she, police, city officials and other advocates visited the Episcopal Hospital building.

"This," she said, "is a momentous day."