City police should be more open on the disposition of rape cases

By Michelle J. Anderson

Rape is a big problem here in Philadelphia, but we are not alone in that respect. A 1997 random-sample survey of more than 10,000 women by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that 20 percent of American women have been forced to have sexual intercourse against their will, which is the legal definition of rape.

Despite the fact that rape is rampant in our society, a myth exists that women routinely lie about sexual abuse. In the last decade, the rate at which the Philadelphia Police Department has decided that reported sexual assaults were unworthy of further investigation was an unfortunate endorsement of this myth.

The police failed to pursue cases for two reasons.

First, when a police officer deemed a rape complaint "unfounded," the officer concluded that the victim was fabricating the complaint.

Second, when a police officer assigned a sexual-assault complaint to a noncriminal code such as "investigation of person" or, more recently, "investigation, protection, medical examination," the officer concluded that what happened was simply not a crime.

In the last decade, the rate for "unfounded" rape reached 18 percent, and the rate for assigning sexual-assault complaints to noncriminal codes reached 30 percent. These remarkable percentages did not reflect a propensity on the part of Philadelphians to exaggerate about having been sexually abused.

Rather, they reflected pressure within the police department to build an impressive arrest record for rape, pressure that created an incentive for police to banish difficult cases, at the expense of justice for many real victims.

Fortunately, things are changing. Police Commissioner John F. Timoney assigned 45 temporary detectives to reinvestigate more than 2,000 sexual assault cases that had been buried by the department in the last five years. Timoney has established monthly meetings with women's advocates and has authorized overtime for detectives trying to work quickly on fresh complaints. Most recently, Timoney decided to add as many as 20 new detectives permanently to the department that addresses sexual crimes, the Special Victims Unit.

We should all applaud the commissioner for these positive changes, but difficulties in the classification of rape cases remain.

Timoney and the new Special Victims Unit commander, Captain Joseph M. Mooney, have said that police should assign non-criminal codes to cases in which women report having been raped but were unconscious from drugs or alcohol at the time of the assault. There is simply no legal support for this position.

On the contrary, the Pennsylvania criminal code defines rape to include engaging in sexual intercourse with a victim who is unconscious. It also defines rape as engaging in sexual intercourse when a person has substantially impaired the victim's power to control his or her conduct by administering drugs or intoxicants to the victim without his or her knowledge. There is nothing in the code that indicates that someone who is unconscious, drugged or drunk at the time of a sexual attack has not been raped.

Miscoding sexual assault crimes is the central mechanism by which Philadelphia police failed sexual abuse victims in the past, and it is important that this failure not continue in the future. Therefore, we need a complete accounting of the cases that enter the Special Victims Unit annually.

What crimes do these cases represent? How many end up being considered unfounded? How many others end up in non-criminal categories? On what basis are they assigned such codes?

The next positive step Timoney should take is to give the public what it deserves: a detailed report on the cases that entered the Special Victim's Unit in the past year. We need a statistical analysis of the disposition of these cases.

Such an open assessment would help put an end to the days in which the Special Victim's Unit disposed of sexual assault complaints efficiently, but without justice for victims as its anchor. If warranted, such an assessment would also help to reestablish public confidence in the unit itself and the police department as a whole.