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A Philadelphia Story
Ms. Magazine, June/July 2001
Women’s groups and members of the police department
join forces to arrest rapists and bring them to justice
Samantha Richards (not her real name) was only 7 on January
12, 1996, when 29-year-old Jasper Washington pulled her into his car, drove a
few miles, raped her, and pushed her out onto the snow-covered ground. Doctors
found dried blood and semen in the girl’s underwear. “The man laid me
down and pulled my pants down,” she told investigators. Samantha’s family
knew her attacker—he had once dated her aunt. In the years after the rape,
Samantha saw him several times walking in her North Philadelphia neighborhood.
“How is she going to feel safe if he’s walking past the house?”
Samantha’s mother asked a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter in 1999.
It was not until four years after the attack that Samantha’s
rapist was convicted in a Philadelphia courtroom. That was too long, says a unique
alliance of women’s advocacy groups and the Philadelphia Police Department,
who have been organizing to make the prosecution of rapists a top priority.
Samantha’s mother had given a sex crimes officer Washington’s
full name and address in 1996 . The officer, a member of the Special Victims Unit
(SVU), never followed up for questioning. And when the young victim failed to
pick the right man out of a photo line-up, the case was coded “2701,”
or “investigation of person,” a noncriminal designation that is supposed
to indicate the need for further investigation. But for years, cases labeled 2701
went into limbo. Since 2701 cases go unreported to the FBI, the code helped improve
Philadelphia crime statistics by omitting many reported rapes and sexual offenses
from the official record.
Richards’ case might have remained unresolved if the
Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t begun a groundbreaking investigative series
in late 1999. The newspaper found, among other facts, that one third of the SVU’s
caseload had been labeled 2701 and dropped from active investigation. Pressure
to provide rosy stats, officers burned out by too many cases, and a police culture
that ignored sexism may have led to the unit’s failure to adequately investigate
rapes.
After Samantha Richards’ story appeared in the Inquirer,
the police reopened the case. The series also attracted the attention of Carol
Tracy, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Women’s Law Project,
who says, “It became clear to us that significant advocacy needed to be done.”
She asked Philadelphia’s city council to get involved in order to bring the
matter into a more public venue. That December, a city council hearing was held.
Among the groupd to appear was Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), which had
compiled a file of complaints about police insensitivity to rape. WOAR also charged
that many rape victims’ trauma had been intensified by insensitivity, particularly
on the part of the SVU.
Several months after that hearing, Police Commissioner John
Timoney extended an unprecedented invitation to women’s and children’s
advocacy groups in Philadelphia, asking that they form a committee to oversee
the review of recent “unfounded” cases. (When a case is declared unfounded,
it means the police have determined that a crime has not occurred.) When asked
why he decided to invite this public oversight, Timoney says, “We wanted
to restore public confidence. I thought getting an outside group who would report
to the public would help that.”
Women’s advocates were impressed. “When the action
was taken by Timoney, there was a clamoring for info,” says Jan Bailey, communications
director for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, near Harrisburg. “I
fielded calls from rape crisis centers as far away as the state of Washington.”
According to the Inquirer, at the second city council hearing
in June 2000, Timoney testified that nearly 1,000 cases labeled 2701 (out of a
total 2,000) had already been reviewed. The review—largely of cases 1995
and 1996—showed that 346 cases were rapes and 469 were other sexual offenses,
ranging from molestation to forced oral sex. He also confirmed allegations about
the SVU’s insensitivity.
“There were some women who were raped, subjected to
some kind of sexual crime, that the police treated at the least improperly, probably
unprofessionally, and probably in a god-awful manner,” Timoney said, according
to the Inquirer. “I think the reason he extended the invitation to us when
he did,” says Tracy, “was that he was getting that kind of info internally,
that it was much worse than he thought it was.”
By the third and most recent city council hearing in December
2000, 91 percent of the 2701 cases had been reviewed. According to the Inquirer,
more than 700 cases were found to be rapes, with over 500 determined other sexual
crimes.
The Inquirer’s detective work and work of advocacy groups
has resulted in a major corrective process that’s still underway at the SVU.
Timoney and Captain Joseph Mooney of the SVU have set up a command structure to
make sure investigators are fully trained in how to treat victims. WOAR is helping
to revise the training at the police academy and unit levels. And the SVU has
instituted follow-up protocol: a letter sent to every victim names the investigating
officer for their case and lists four different advocacy groups they can contact.
In what Timoney calls a “quality control survey,” a victim’s assistance
officer contacts victims to make sure they feel their cases have been properly
investigated. The Women’s Law Project has helped to revise the coding manual,
and the unit now has 88 officers and detectives, over a third more than in 1998.
“More important,” says Timoney, “the people we’re putting
in there are trained investigators.” When Timoney took over in 1998, the
unit was mostly comprised of beat officers.
To “unfound” a case now requires the signatures
of two officers; Philadelphia’s unfounded rate is down to 7 percent from
a high of 18 percent in 1998.
The women’s groups involved intend to continue their
work with the police. And Samantha Richards can now walk in her neighborhood without
fear of running into her rapist. Jasper Washington was arrested in late 2000,
when his DNA was discovered to match samples taken from Samantha’s clothes.
He was tried and convicted last December and at press time was awaiting sentencing.
The overhaul of the SVU has brought attention to the issue
of rape in Philadelphia and some comfort to women who feel they’re now being
heard instead of screaming into a void. Advocates hope that other cities will
take notice. “I doubt Philly’s the only city that downgrades crimes,”
says Tracy. Carol Johnson, executive director of WOAR, agrees: “All we can
do is keep working together to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And maybe
other cities will take heed and clean their own houses.”
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