The NYPD’s beleaguered sex-crimes unit was excoriated on Monday during a five-hour City Council hearing that included damning testimony from neglected victims and a former member of the unit — as lawmakers consider sweeping legislation to overhaul the operation.
Members of the Committee on Women and the Committee on Public Safety grilled police brass over the troubling Department of Investigation report that found the Special Victims Division was too understaffed and poorly trained to properly investigate its thousands of cases.
“According to a recent report by [the DOI], the Police Department has been knowingly neglecting victims of sexual assault since 2010 and undoubtedly before that,” said Councilman Donovan Richards, chairman of the Public Safety Committee.The hearing grew heated at times.
“I take umbrage that you don’t think we take this seriously,” snapped NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan.
Reading from prepared testimony, he added, “If there is one message that I want to convey at today’s hearing, it is this: The NYPD stands ready, each and every day, to support the survivors of these crimes, to hold offenders accountable, and prevent future acts of violence.”
While Richards’ co-chair, Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, lauded the NYPD for launching an initiative last week to improve sex-crime reporting, she said the program, titled The Call is Yours, could all be for nothing unless the department steps up.
“It won’t matter unless the NYPD finally makes investigating sexual assault a priority — not just in principal but in practice,” Rosenthal said.
At one point during the hearing, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Larry Byrne traded barbs with Rosenthal over what he called her “complete lack of understanding” of CompStat’s tracking of rape.
When Rosenthal fired back saying she would like to be educated, Byrne fumed, “You need a lot of education on this topic, obviously.”
In its report two weeks ago, the DOI said there were just 67 detectives to handle 5,661 cases last year across all Special Victims squads, which handle adult sex-crime cases in the five boroughs.
The DOI also found that new recruits were undertrained — with the majority being “white shield” police officers serving provisionally as detectives — and that the SVD prioritized rapes committed by strangers over rapes by acquaintances and domestic partners.
Now the council is looking to pass four bills that would require sweeping changes to the SVD.
They would require the NYPD to utilize an “evidence-based staffing model to determine staffing” in the SVD and adopt a new case-management system to track cases and victims.
The proposed bills would also require SVD investigators to complete at least 10 weeks of specialized training before even coming into contact with victims, as well as more training for new recruits and all police officers on “gender-based street harassment and sexual assault.”
“Investigators are not being properly trained,” Richards said.
But NYPD officials are vehemently against the proposed bills.
“We respectfully oppose the legislation being proposed today,” said NYPD lawyer Oleg Chernyavsky.Chernyavsky said some of the council’s proposals “dilute the police commissioner’s authority.”
Monahan, meanwhile, defended the SVD as being staffed with experienced supervisors and detectives, who have an average of 8.1 years and 6.6 years of experience, respectively.
“We know that responding properly to sexual assault requires special skills,” he said. “Simply put, Special Victims investigators are the best-trained sex crimes investigators in the country.”
Only 20 percent of SVD applicants are accepted, and once they are, they undergo a two-week criminal-investigation course and five-day special-victims investigator course, Monahan said.
“Every case we receive is not a number, it is a person, a victim, a survivor,” Monahan testified. “I want to assure every New Yorker that the NYPD takes rape and sexual assault seriously and the department investigates every report thoroughly.”
One of the victims who testified at the hearing said she reported her rape to a detective who “was immediately skeptical.”
“The police scoffed and told me, ‘He’s not going to jail for this,’ ” the woman wrote in testimony read out loud by a friend. “When I voiced my concerns to the NYPD, they told me, ‘This is just how things works.’ In other words, this was normal to them. That’s not OK.”
Last week, Police Commissioner James O’Neill announced a “top-to-bottom scrub” of the SVD and said an additional 20 detectives have already been added to the unit.
The NYPD will issue a formal response to the DOI report within the next 90 days.