Timoney says he will make call on rape cases

The commissioner asserted police jurisdiction, even as he invited unprecedented public oversight.

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

Clarifying his unusual offer to let women's organizations play a role in the classification of sex crimes, Police Commissioner John F. Timoney said that the department would be the ultimate judge of cases - and that he personally would make the final call.

"Really, for the first time ever, an outside monitor will be looking over our shoulder and sharing ideas with us, and letting us know if we're doing things correctly," Timoney said.

Speaking on the Court TV cable channel Thursday - an appearance that was a sign of the national interest sparked by his proposal - the commissioner laid out what would happen if civilians and sex-crimes officers had a dispute on a case.

"If they disagree with a classification, that will be bumped up to me for the final say," Timoney said.

Carol E. Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project, said the groups understood that they would serve only in an advisory role.

Tracy and other advocates are to meet with Timoney next week to further discuss the proposal. Tracy said she also had been consulting with prominent lawyers and others in town to find ways to broaden the group of people who would take part in the review. She said that criminologists, former prosecutors and others, both male and female, could join the review team.

Advocates for children who are victims of sexual abuse would likely join the effort, she said. Two-thirds of the sex crimes unit's caseload each year involves victims under 18, many of them boys.

"Because there has been some suggestion that women's groups would be biased," Tracy said yesterday, "we don't want a process that is in any way tainted."

Tracy said she anticipated that the group would focus both on cases that the police think should be deemed "unfounded" - groundless - and on any placed in noncriminal categories.

Michelle J. Anderson, a professor at Villanova University law school, said yesterday that the group should push for regular statistical accountings of all cases.

"The criticism of police is not simply that they are 'unfounding' legitimate complaints," said Anderson, who testified in December in City Council hearings on the rape squad. "It is that there have been difficult cases that have ended up in administrative dead zones."

Anderson also urged the police to adopt a policy of formally notifying victims of the final classifications of their complaints.

Doing so, she said, would provide "a kind of empowerment for a victim. That truthful information allows him or her to respond to the system and to challenge misclassifications. Failure to disclose circumvents that opportunity."

In articles published during the last six months, The Inquirer has documented how the sex crimes unit for years put up to 30 percent of its caseloads into noncriminal classifications - a form of limbo that kept the cases out of crime statistics. The favorite such category was called "investigation of person," a coding that the unit has now abandoned. Cases given such a code often received little or no investigation.

While Timoney has shared many crime statistics with the public, the department has never documented precisely how it classifies all cases handled by the sex-crimes unit.

An Inquirer analysis of 1998 figures found that the unit handled 4,100 complaints that year. (Figures for 1999 are too incomplete for meaningful analysis.)

The coding of about three-quarters of those 1998 cases is known; most were classified as rapes or other sex crimes.

Public records, however, leave it unclear how the remaining 25 percent of the cases were classified. All that is known is that they were classified as various kinds of minor, nonsexual crimes, such as simple assaults, or were put into noncriminal categories.

Under Timoney, the squad is putting far fewer cases into noncriminal classifications. Cases that are unclear or ambiguous, however, will not be classified as crimes, the commissioner said.

The department has forbidden sex-crimes investigators to use the discredited "investigation of person" code. (The unit labeled the first two attacks of the so-called Rittenhouse Square rapist this way.)

The department has, however, continued to put some cases in two other noncriminal categories. They are Code 2625, "investigation, protection, medical examination," and Code 2656, "offenses other than specified."