By Daniel Rubin
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Watching Philadelphia Police Capt. John Darby talk to reporters last month about the rape of a jogger near Forbidden Drive, Carol Tracy sat before the television, slack-jawed.
She couldn’t believe how sensitive he seemed.
Police had no suspect. The victim had been unwilling to sit with detectives.
“He said he understood how traumatic this event was for the victim, and that he hoped she would be in a place where she would be able to speak to police in a short time,” recalled Tracy, who directs the Women’s Law Project. “He understood the trauma of the event was having a devastating impact on her.”
And to Tracy, that was news.
You may not realize it, but Philadelphia police have made a remarkable turnaround in the way they handle sexual assaults. Once pariahs, they are now models.
Down with crime
It was 10 years ago that The Inquirer began a series of articles documenting how the Special Victims Unit had buried thousands of reports of assaults since its formation in 1981, deliberately mislabeling rapes and other serious offenses to make the city look safer.
Victims’ stories were bottom-drawered if they seemed troublesome to prove, downgraded to something called a 2701: investigation of person, a category that hid the commission of a crime.
A victim’s experience was no less appalling.
The squad operated out of the Frankford Arsenal, behind razor wire. And that was an upgrade. For its first decade, the squad was based in an old Port Richmond schoolhouse with balky heat and no air-conditioning.
The next stop was the former stables at 17th and Pattison. “If the wind was blowing in a certain direction . . . " Darby says evocatively.
Since 2003, the squad has been anchored in the bottom four floors of a tower on the campus of Episcopal Hospital. That’s where Tracy is about to convene an extraordinary panel next month to review all the Special Victims Unit’s cases.
She, Carol Johnson of Women Organized Against Rape, Christine Kirchner of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, and Frank Cevone from the Support Center for Child Advocates will spend a few days poring through each sexual-assault file.
The group began in 2000. John Timoney, who was then commissioner, felt the department needed community oversight after the classification scandal.
Impressive numbers Tracy says that over the years her reception has warmed from frigid to comfortable. “If, for example, we see that perhaps a witness wasn’t interviewed, we put a little yellow sticky on that file folder. Or it may be that we’ve seen some question that sounds like it’s more interrogation and victim-blaming.” Several times a day squad supervisors must answer the panel’s questions.
Police do not like it when the panel finds something, she observes. “I think that’s why their files have improved. They’re better organized, the narratives are better written. It’s very impressive.”
How effective are they? I asked Mark Fazlollah, one of the reporters on the 1999 series, to run some numbers. They show that for 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available, no U.S. city had a better arrest rate for rape than Philadelphia.
The greatest advance, Tracy says, is in the way Philadelphia police treat those who report attacks. This is no small thing. Right now her organization is ready to file a brief supporting a civil-rights suit brought by a gas-station cashier in Butler County who was herself arrested after police believe she’d lied about being sexually assaulted. The assailant has since confessed.
“Once you start understanding how traumatic this is for so many people, then you know it’s not an issue of a victim’s credibility, it’s an issue of what she’s experienced,” Tracy said. “She has to deal with it as best as she can.”
And, this she says, is something that Philadelphia gets. “How far we’ve come.”
Copyright 2009 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC