Rape-squad defense an 'outrage'
Rally hits Blas’ response to DOI report
Mayor de Blasio should be enraged over a scathing report that found the NYPD is selling sex-assault victims short — and stop giving cops the benefit of the doubt, women’s groups said Thursday during a rally outside Police Headquarters.
“Why isn’t the city’s mayor as outraged as you and me?” Sonia Ossorio, president of the city’s chapter of the National Organization for Women, demanded at the rally, held to protest understaffing and undertraining at the NYPD’s Special Victims Division alleged in a new DOI report.
“City Hall’s response was to call the Special Victims Division of the NYPD ‘the best in the nation,’ ” Ossorio railed. “Nothing could be further from the truth.
“What the mayor should have said is, ‘I expect better, the women of New York City expect better, and I will do everything in my power to get to the bottom of this,’ ” she said.
Ossorio was one of about a dozen women’s advocates who held up signs reading, “Rape is Always a Crime,” “NYPD Act Now,” and “Take Rape Seriously” at the rally outside One Police Plaza.
They were protesting a 163-page, city Department of Investigation report, made public Tuesday, claiming the NYPD’s sex crimes unit is overburdened and underprepared.
Hours after the rally, de Blasio insisted that “the commitment is 100 percent there” to do “whatever it takes to get justice for women who have been victims of crimes and to stop these crimes from happening to begin with.”
But he also sided with the NYPD, and against DOI investigators, on the numbers.
The DOI found that just 67 SVD detectives — only five of them first-grade veterans — handled the city’s staggering load of 5,661 sex crime cases in 2017.
That compares with the 101 homicide detectives assigned to cover just 282 slayings that same year.
The report also said new recruits get only five days of specialized sex-crimes training.
NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill countered that there were actually 85 detectives handling the department’s sexcrime caseload.
But investigators insist their numbers are based on the NYPD’s own documents.
As he spoke to reporters about an unrelated cyber-security initiative Thursday, de Blasio backed O’Neill’s side of the story.
“The NYPD disputes a number of the facts in that analysis,” he said of the DOI report.
“And I think the NYPD has proven over and over again that it has been very, very effective at addressing a whole host of crimes, and of course I respect the commissioner’s team,” he said, adding, “I think the NYPD really needs to be heard on this before anyone passes judgment.
“But I think the question is, ‘Wouldn’t we invest if we need to address a problem?’ Of course we will.”