It’s a horror story, the kind sure to grip the city: Five youths approach a woman, 18, and her father near a Brownsville playground. At gunpoint, they allegedly bully the dad into leaving, then gang-rape the woman before her father can bring police to the scene.
Four suspects are now in custody, two turned in by their parents. Among the four, one won’t talk, another says he left before anything happened and two insist it was consensual sex. But the woman “has cuts and bruises consistent with being physically attacked,” says Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis.
Other details include the fact that the father and daughter were drinking heavily beforehand — such that the dad couldn’t make himself understood at two bodegas when he sought help.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is upset the NYPD didn’t publicize the Thursday night crime until Saturday, after it found a videotape of the suspects.
The delay seems a bit odd — especially after Mayor de Blasio, asked Monday when he learned of the rape, answered only, “I’ll get back to you.” But it’s hard to see any dark motive for keeping this under wraps: It was going to be big news whenever it broke.
And Saturday, when it did break, was too soon for anyone to have forgotten Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s lame advice earlier in the week that women use the “buddy system” to reduce their risk of assault.
Or to forget his bid to downplay the 2015 rise in rapes by blaming “the Cosby effect.”
The commish suggests one cause of the rise in rape reports is that more women are inspired to report old crimes. But the NYPD can’t show any such increase, because it has no stats on “Cosby” reports in years past.
We’re left with a tale that can only feed fears on violent crime in the post-stop-and-frisk era — fears that Bratton & Co. can only ease by continuing to keep crime down.
By action, not words — especially not ill-considered ones.