'Stranger Rapes' Are Priority For Worn-Out Sex Crime Cops: Report

NEW YORK, NY — The NYPD has left its special sex crimes division understaffed for nearly a decade even amid a spike in cases and internal warnings, city investigators said in a report published Tuesday.

The 67 detectives in the Special Victims Division's adult sex crimes units handled more than 5,600 cases last year, a load over 20 times heavier than the NYPD's homicide squad, the Department of Investigation report said.

The Police Department has kept Special Victims staffing essentially unchanged even though the sex crime caseload has increased 65.3 percent since 2009, the DoI found in a yearlong probe conducted by the department's NYPD inspector general and other staff.

The division's overwhelmed staffers work in dilapidated offices and give more attention to high-profile cases and "stranger rapes," often leaving other cases in the hands of untrained precinct detectives, the DoI found.

The report said the NYPD should double the size of its sex crime units to make sure every case and victim are treated properly.

"Victims of sexual assault deserve justice, with the full weight of law enforcement by their side," DoI Commissioner Mark Peters said in a statement. "The neglect and understaffing of NYPD’s Special Victims Division are serious and deeply troubling and the failure to treat acquaintance rape as an equal priority is unacceptable."

Police brass have left the Special Victims Division — tasked with investigating sex crimes, child abuse and hate crimes — woefully shorthanded despite "repeated warnings" from its leadership and a 2010 report from the NYPD's own Sex Crimes Working Group that recommended hiring 26 extra investigators, the report says.

The dearth of staff has led the division to prioritize "stranger rapes" and "cases with high media profiles" while giving short shrift to other sexual assaults, says the report, which calls the practice "unacceptable in modern law enforcement."

That's despite the fact that domestic and acquaintance rapes — cases in which the victim knows the perpetrator — account for nearly 90 percent of the city's reported rapes every year, the report said.

In some of those cases, precinct detectives continue the investigation after an arrest is made, meaning cops without special sex crimes training handle cases that are notoriously difficult to prosecute, the DoI found.

Additionally, Special Victims Division staff work in cramped, unsanitary spaces where they're forced to interview victims near other cops and even holding cells, the report says. Such run-down facilities make victims less likely to report sex crimes and more likely to "disengage" once an investigation has started, the report found.

In January, Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the Special Victims Division added 26 investigators in 2017, boosting its ranks to 259 investigators with plans to add more this year. Each investigator has been trained in an "empathy-based" technique to get information from victims of trauma, he said.

"That’s the largest Special Victims Division in the country," Boyce said in January. "So we’ll keep going forward in that direction.

But the DoI found that only four investigators were added to the adult sex crime staff last year, all of whom were assigned to Staten Island. The others went to different units within the Special Victims Division, such as the child abuse squads, the report says.

The DoI recommended hiring 73 new detectives to the Special Victims Division's sex crime squads to keep up with the heavy caseload. The NYPD should also have the division treat all rape cases the same, train sex crime detectives more thoroughly and renovate or move the spaces where the division's sex crime units work, the report says.

The report comes amid a nationwide movement to combat sexual harassment and assault that has led to the downfall of several powerful figures, such as disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and U.S. Sen. Al Franken. The NYPD and Manhattan prosecutors are pursuing rape charges against Weinstein.

The Police Department has created a team of investigators to handle high-profile sex crime cases, the New York Daily News reported in December.

The New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women said the DoI's findings provide more evidence supporting women's rights advocates' long-held concerns about how police handle sexual assault cases.

"This report confirms what we see first hand: sexual assault is not treated as a high priority at the top levels of the NYPD, and sex crime victims and public safety suffer the consequences," Jane Manning, the director of advocacy for Women's Justice NOW, a NOW sister organization, said in a statement.

NYPD spokesman J. Peter Donald slammed the report as "an investigation in name only" that damages "the relationships of trust the (Special Victims Division) has worked hard to develop with survivors of sex crimes."

Investigators failed to interview key NYPD officials and misstated figures about the division's staffing levels and caseload, Donald said in an emailed statement. He said the division has 85 detectives handling adult sex crime cases, not 67. Each investigator had 62 cases on average last year, he said, while the average precinct-level investigator had 150 to 175.

The Special Victims Division uses a "survivor-centered" investigation model, which does not pressure victims to participate in criminal investigations after reporting sex crimes, Donald said. The division and other police brass also meet regularly with advocates, he said.

"Even the Inspector General’s own document recognizes that the NYPD has been and continues to be the leader in investigating sex crimes—a view held by many others—in New York City and around the world," Donald said.

(Lead image: Photo by BravoKiloVideo/Shutterstock)