‘Negligent, sexist’ unit that inspired SVU faces inquiry
The US Justice Department has launched a sweeping inquiry into the New York Police Department’s famed sex crimes investigators, following years of complaints about the way they treat crime victims.
The civil rights investigation, spurred by a letter last year from appalled victims, would examine whether the NYPD’s Special Victims Division engages in a pattern of gender-biased policing, officials said.
The unit inspired the TV show Law & Order: SVU, and has tackled such major cases as the prosecution of former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. But it has also faced a decade of complaints about thin staffing and superficial investigations.
In a 2019 lawsuit, a woman alleged that detectives shrugged off her report of being raped by someone she had been involved with, logging it as a ‘‘dispute’’ instead of a sex crime.
Another woman said in the lawsuit that her account of being kidnapped and gangraped was grossly mishandled for months before she was told that the case was ‘‘too complex’’ to investigate.
After the lawsuit and a leadership shakeup, the NYPD promised change. But victims’ happened.
The NYPD said it welcomed the review and was committed to improving its investigations.
Justice Department officials said they planned a comprehensive review of policies, procedures and training for the Special Victims Division’s sex assault investigations – including how police interacted with survivors and witnesses, collected evidence and completed their investigations.
In a letter to the Justice Department last August calling for an investigation, victims described the NYPD’s work on sex advocates say this hasn’t crimes and other sensitive cases as ‘‘negligent and sexist’’.
The Weinstein case spotlighted the sex crimes division, which helped to build a prosecution that ended with a watershed conviction for the #MeToo movement. But along the way, prosecutors dropped one of the charges in 2018, after evidence surfaced that a detective had coached a witness and told an accuser to delete material from her cellphone.
Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer for the woman whose allegation was dropped from the case, said she welcomed shining a light on police practices.
‘‘Our experience is that many viable sexual assault cases are tossed out by police at the earliest stages of investigation,’’ Goldberg said. ‘‘On the other hand, some of the most consequential sexual assault prosecutions of recent history – for example, that of Harvey Weinstein – were driven by the tenacity of dedicated NYPD investigators.’’
Last October, a woman who identified herself as a rape victim told a city council hearing that detectives failed to interview witnesses, collect security camera footage from the bar where she had been before the attack, or test for date-rape drugs. She said they closed the case twice without telling her.
In another case, detailed in a 2020 article in The New York Times, a New York University student said a sex crimes detective openly doubted her allegation that a stranger had raped her in her apartment. She said the investigator talked her out of moving forward, and shut down the case.
The suspected rapist, identified through fingerprints on a condom wrapper found at the apartment, was later jailed on burglary charges – but ended up being released and assaulting three more women because the Special Victims Division never told prosecutors he was a rape suspect, the Times reported. –AP