Police checking into old sex cases

The department is reviewing hundreds of assault complaints in Phila. dating from early '98.

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

Philadelphia police are conducting an extraordinary review of hundreds of sexual-assault complaints that detectives had either rejected as groundless or filed in administrative categories where they did not show up in crime statistics.

Supervisors in the Special Victims Unit have been poring over files on cases dating to the start of 1998 that were dismissed as "unfounded" or given noncriminal designations such as "investigation of person."

The officers have handed several dozen cases back to detectives and instructed them to seek out and interview the women who filed the complaints, according to people familiar with the review.

The review could trigger a surge in the city's official crime count - as well as fresh efforts to find and prosecute suspects in cases that had been considered closed.

An Inquirer series published Oct. 17 and 18 reported that the sex-crimes unit buried thousands of sexual-assault cases over the last two decades, rejecting many as "unfounded" and dumping nearly a third of its caseload in bureaucratic way stations such as "investigation of person."

Cases that were shelved received little or no investigation, The Inquirer found. Many victims said police never contacted them after an initial hospital interview. Others said investigators seemed determined to debunk their accounts.

Current and former sex-crimes officers said they used such tactics to cope with a steep workload, inadequate staffing, and pressure from commanders to generate favorable statistics.

Over the years, the rape squad alternated between "unfounding" large numbers of cases and - when that tactic provoked scrutiny - making heavy use of noncriminal categories such as "investigation of person."

The Inquirer series reported that Philadelphia's rate of "unfounding" rape complaints nearly doubled in 1998 - to 18 percent, the highest rate among the 10 largest cities.

Last week, women's groups demanded a review of cases that had been "unfounded," or buried bureaucratically. City Council members called for hearings. A majority now supports a public examination of the department's handling of sex crimes.

In the current review, two of the six lieutenants in the Special Victims Unit are being paid overtime to reexamine the "unfounded" rape complaints - 163 in 1998 alone.

The squad is also taking a second look at more than 200 cases placed in a noncrime category called Code 2625 - "investigation, protection, medical examination." The unit began using that code about two years after "investigation of person" was questioned by the FBI and departmental auditors.

"Every one of the '2625' cases and the 'unfoundeds' is being reviewed," said a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the review.

A small group of cases put in the "investigation of person" file within the last two years are also being reviewed.

In an interview earlier this month, Police Commissioner John F. Timoney asserted that the city's 18 percent "unfounded" rate did not indicate anything wrong in the department's handling of sex crimes.

He said the unfounded cases were rejected based on careful investigation. He said that Philadelphia's unfounded rate exceeded that of other large cities because police elsewhere kept complaints out of the system at an early stage - and thus did not have to "unfound" them later.

Timoney has also defended the use of Code 2625, saying that officers need a way to classify a small percentage of sexual-assault complaints that, on investigation, are too ambiguous to be called crimes.

Asked this week about the current review, Timoney referred reporters to comments he made during an Oct. 8 news conference. He said then that the department was reviewing some sexual-assault cases from previous years in its effort to catch the man responsible for a string of sexual assaults and a murder in the Rittenhouse Square area since 1997.

Asked yesterday for clarification, Timoney said: "Forget about it. You've got your answers."

The push for Council hearings is being led by Councilman Angel L. Ortiz, chairman of the Public Safety Committee.

Several women's groups, including Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) and the Women's Law Project, wrote Ortiz urging hearings. The groups have sharply criticized the city's "unfounded" rate and the shelving of cases in noncrime classifications.

"I cannot believe that women in Philadelphia falsely say they were raped more than in other parts of the United States," Susan Frietsche, an attorney with the Women's Law Project, said in a recent interview. "There have always been myths about rape, and this is a myth."

Harry O'Reilly, a New York law-enforcement consultant who recently trained two Philadelphia rape-squad supervisors in investigative techniques, said in an interview that the department should conduct a case-by-case review of its "unfounded" cases.

"You have to look at the criteria for unfounding cases," said O'Reilly, a former New York City police officer and a founder of that department's sex crimes unit. "You cannot just ignore it."

Carole Johnson, WOAR's executive director, said in a recent interview that the department should go back at least five years in any review of buried cases. The statute of limitations is five years for rape and two years for lesser sex offenses.

In addition to the review of cases, the unit has assigned officers to reinterview four victims whose sexual-assault cases were detailed in the Inquirer articles. The incidents were all classified under Code 2625.

"In all the cases, we're trying actively to reinterview the complainants," Capt. Joseph M. Mooney, commander of the Special Victims Unit, said in a interview earlier this month.