Editorial

More work to do

Scrutiny and safeguards will be needed to ensure changes in city's sex-crimes unit.

Philadelphia police have far more work ahead of them if they plan to redress a legacy of two decades in which thousands of women's reported sexual assaults were dismissed or shelved - often improperly and sometimes with nightmarish results.

Commissioner John F. Timoney has taken important steps, speaking out against the outrageous practice of downgrading crime reports to shave the city's reported crime rate. He's also made welcome personnel changes and initiated better training at the sex-crimes unit itself. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the job is done.

There's no dispute that the most pressing unfinished business is catching the Center City serial rapist and eventual killer of Shannon Schieber, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student. The killer has slipped through the cracks so far; unfortunately, police dismissed the claims of two Center City women whom, it turns out, he attacked a year before the Schieber murder.

But, as The Inquirer reported this week, there are hundreds of other shelved cases that might deserve a fresh look. Leaders of Women Organized Against Rape and the Women's Law Project, and Common Pleas Court Judge Lisa A. Richette this week urged a wholesale, possibly independent, review.

At a minimum, Mr. Timoney and Mayor Rendell - and the mayor's successor - need to commit to examining cases from the last few years.

As for structural changes in the sex-crimes unit, Mr. Timoney's position is that his "complete reorganization" over the last year had ended fudging of crime statistics.

The department's statistics for 1998 clearly show a truer picture of sex assaults reported to police. But even with the department's new disclosures, there remain hundreds of cases unexplained.

That's why safeguards are needed to prevent these practices from recurring. One tactic: The city should provide a detailed annual accounting of sex-assault victims' cases, preserving privacy but explaining how cases were handled.

There's a more urgent issue, and that's whether the sex-crimes unit is staffed, supported and structured properly to do its best work.

New leadership installed by Mr. Timoney at the now-named Special Victims Unit is important, and it's good that detectives have been detailed to the unit for the first time. The same goes for increasing the professionalism of investigators through training.

But the unit remains overburdened and underequipped. Picture dozens of staff with only a handful of computers - some purchased by officers themselves. And, renovated or not, the unit's facilities at the barbed-wire-enclosed Frankford Arsenal are inconvenient and downright forbidding.

Beyond looking at ways to juggle resources better, the Police Department has to move ahead with sensible suggestions - employed in many other cities - to restructure sex-crimes work.

Where crimes against children are concerned, it makes sense to better link police and social workers, who also have to investigate abuse reports. That's been pushed by the city's child-advocate community for two years. Similarly, City Councilman Jim Kenney offers a vision of a "Family Violence Unit" that would target domestic abuse and sexual assaults, since they're often related. Both plans would have the advantage of relocating some or all of the sex-crimes unit work to better quarters.

Ongoing scrutiny and structural changes are needed in Philadelphia's handling of rape and other sex assaults, and, so far, the city's response could be improved.