Timoney to raise rape unit staffing

With as many as 20 new detectives, numbers could increase by a third. More overtime will be approved.

By Michael Matza
Craig R. McCoy
and Mark Fazlollah
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, as part of a series of moves to improve the sex-crimes unit, says he will add as many as 20 detectives to the squad to increase its investigative staff by a third.

Timoney has also brought in women's advocates to conduct training for sex-crimes officers and is seeking money to buy laptop computers for investigators.

Meanwhile, the unit's commander, with strong support from the commissioner, has sought to infuse urgency into sexual-assault investigations by approving overtime far more readily than in the past.

The thinking is that sex-crimes detectives are more likely to solve cases if they work intensely while leads are fresh - the approach used by the Homicide Division.

Together, the changes signal that the Special Victims Unit, long a neglected backwater where statistical trickery was often substituted for sound investigation, has become a high priority for Timoney.

Timoney, in an interview, said he would add 15 to 20 detectives to the unit in the summer. The squad now has about 55 investigators.

That does not include the 45 newly promoted detectives whom Timoney sent to the unit last month to reinvestigate more than 2,000 sexual-assault cases that had been buried by investigators in past years.

Those detectives are at the unit temporarily. They are expected to complete their work in six months. At that point, most will move to other detective divisions around the city.

However, some will stay permanently at Special Victims, and some veteran detectives will be shifted there from other units to bolster the staff.

Timoney said the department's chief of detectives, John T. Maxwell, was reviewing the unit's caseload to determine exactly how many new detectives were needed. Timoney said as many as 20 would be added.

"They're going to get more detectives," he said.

Current and former members of the rape squad said inadequate staffing was a main reason for the unit's past practice of minimizing or rejecting women's complaints. Commanders wanted cases quickly "cleared" - solved with an arrest - so that the unit's statistics would look good, they said. Investigators said that generated intense pressure to discard complaints that could not easily be solved.

Last year, the unit's 55 permanent investigators handled about 5,000 complaints - 90 cases each. That was 20 times the caseload for homicide detectives.

If Timoney adds 20 sex-crimes detectives, the workload would drop to about 67 cases per investigator.

Already, the unit's permanent investigators have been given a green light to pursue current cases even if it means running up overtime. In the past, supervisors were very reluctant to approve overtime, said veteran members of the squad.

"We're trying to improve the quality of investigations and the immediate follow-up," Capt. Joseph M. Mooney, who took command of the unit a year ago, said in an interview. "The case comes in - we run on it. That's what I urge them to do."

Mooney said supervisors were monitoring investigations more carefully to ensure that sexual-assault complaints were classified correctly and investigated properly.

"There's closer supervision than there used to be," Mooney said. "Closer supervision so cases don't get lost."

The squad also is working with outside advocates, including Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR). Last month, the department invited WOAR staff members to provide special training for new and veteran investigators in dealing with sexual-assault victims, especially those assaulted by acquaintances.

The two sessions were the first such in-service training conducted by the activist group in at least three years.

On Friday, leaders of WOAR, the Women's Law Project, and the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women met with Timoney and Mooney at Police Headquarters for the second in a series of monthly meetings to monitor changes in the Special Victims Unit.

Barbara Burgos DiTullio, president of Pennsylvania's NOW chapter, and other women at the meeting said they welcomed Timoney's initiatives.

"He's making some positive changes," DiTullio said yesterday.

Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project, said Timoney told the advocates that he realized the squad needed more staff and resources. The department is looking for a source of money to equip investigators with laptop computers, Tracy said.

Investigators say they have routinely bought their own computers because the unit's handful of personal computers must be shared.

Inquirer articles published since October have detailed how the sex-crimes unit dumped cases en masse from its inception in 1981 till the end of 1997.

Over that period, thousands of cases were either rejected as "unfounded" - indicating that the complainants had fabricated their accounts - or given administrative labels such as "investigation of person." Either way, they did not appear in the city's crime statistics and often received little or no investigation. The practice was never revealed to the public or the victims.

Since December, the unit's headquarters at the former Frankford Arsenal has been abuzz with the activity of the 45 detectives assigned there to reinvestigate complaints misclassified by the squad over the last five years. The cases, mostly from 1995 through 1997, involve reports of rape, attempted rape, indecent assault and other crimes.

At a Dec. 6 City Council hearing on the rape squad, Timoney said he would provide a statistical overview of those cases within a week or two. Council has not gotten the figures.

In an interview Friday, Timoney said he expected to forward the analysis this week to Councilman Angel L. Ortiz, chairman of the public safety committee.

Tracy, of the Women's Law Project, said yesterday that she was encouraged that Timoney had ordered the old cases reinvestigated but viewed with "great alarm what's gone on in the past."

"The allocation of 45 detectives to investigate them is the appropriate response," she said of the buried cases.

"That's a significant amount of police resources. The challenge is to make sure this never happens again."