The Federal Probe Into the NYPD's Special Victims Division

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. What is happening inside the NYPD's Special Victims Division? The US Justice Department has opened a federal probe into the NYPD unit that handles sex crimes cases. It'll try to assess whether the Special Victims Division, they say SVD, has engaged in a pattern or practice of gender-biased policing and look into its overall policies.

Now, this follows years of scandal and allegations that the victims themselves are being treated badly. We'll get into the details of the DOJ's investigation and the history of the SVD's troubles now with Meg O'Connor, a reporter covering police and prosecutors at The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the US criminal legal system. Hi, Meg. Welcome to WNYC. Glad you could join us.

Meg O'Connor: Hey, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The SVD is the unit of the NYPD for people who don't know that handles all sex crimes. Can you give us some more specifics though by way of background about what kinds of crimes and what kinds of circumstances those tend most often to be?

Meg O'Connor: Sure, so the SVD handles all of the reports of sex crimes and of child abuse in New York City. Any child abuse case or sex crime that's reported to the NYPD goes to the SVD. They get about 5,000 to 6,000 sex crimes per year and another couple of thousand child abuse cases. Those sex crimes include everything from groping to rape.

Brian Lehrer: What is the federal Department of Justice trying to get at with this new probe? Why now?

Meg O'Connor: The SVD has been in trouble for years that became very public in 2018 when a city watchdog agency released a pretty damning report on the SVD. The DOJ is looking now because those problems have been highly publicized for a while. There's also been demands directly from victims, survivors, advocates to open an investigation. They actually began looking into this last fall, started to talk to people back then. They are looking into whether the SVD and the NYPD have engaged in a pattern and practice of gender-biased policing. That's because many but not all people who report sex crimes to the SVD are women.

The SVD has done a poor job overall investigating sex crimes for years now. One of the things I'll be considering is, does the NYPD systemically neglect the Special Victims Division while providing other units in the bureau with adequate staffing and training? We've already seen that the answer to that is yes. In 2017, the Special Victims Division had 67 detectives investigating about 6,000 cases, 6,000 sex crimes. That same year, the city's homicide squad had 101 detectives investigating 282 homicides, which are similarly lengthy and complex investigations.

Brian Lehrer: Understaffing, therefore, under-prioritizing the whole unit. Then there are particular ways that they've behaved. For example, from your reporting back in 2018, advocates then said victims were being pressured to sign withdrawal forms to quickly close investigations and protect the department from legal liability. Detectives were pressuring sexual assault victims into closing their cases before they were solved?

Meg O'Connor: Yes. In that instance, I spoke with three survivors who had reported rapes to the NYPD, were working with special victim detectives, and ended up being coerced into signing this form called a case closure form, which gives up their case even though they didn't want to. That form protects the department from legal liability in the event that the victim later wants to sue or police missed a serial rapist by closing that case.

In one instance, we got the forms as well. We got documentation of this. In one instance, the detective actually lied to the victim saying that the form would only put her case on hold pending further investigation. When the woman got the case reopened by a different detective, she learned that the previous detective had never even bothered to recover surveillance footage or interview witnesses.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Now, listeners, sensitive topic obviously. If any of you who've had any of these experiences as a sexual assault victim and with the NYPD for better or worse in your contact with the NYPD, we invite you to call in and tell a piece of your story that you feel comfortable telling in order to help report this story, or you can just ask a question, anybody can, of Meg O'Connor, a reporter covering police and prosecutors at The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the US criminal legal system on the occasion of the US Justice Department opening a federal probe into the NYPD's sexual victims unit.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can tweet your question @BrianLehrer. We just talked about that 2018 case or set of allegations. Then the following year, data you obtained from the NYPD showed that the Special Victims Division had closed 25% of rape cases that year due to a supposed lack of participation from victims. That, I take it, was a number that alarmed civil rights attorneys and advocates. Was it false?

Meg O'Connor: No, that is data directly from the NYPD on how they were closing all their cases. I believe that the data I got in 2019 was from 2018. Yes, that was a red flag to people right off the bat because so few victims report sex crimes in the first place. That begged the question, what are special victims investigators doing that one in four victims don't come back?

Brian Lehrer: The number from the NYPD was real. It's just that the real number was so alarming. 25% of cases that year closed due to a supposed lack of participation from victims. How much of that have you or anybody else been able to document was from this pressure that you were describing before that was really more in the interest of the department itself, either to just move on because they were short-staffed or to protect themselves from liability? How much from actual other barriers to participation from victims that need to be addressed?

Meg O'Connor: The breakdown of those 500 cases is unclear, but it is just generally concerning that one in four would be closed in this manner. Obviously, if you were a victim who's going to the police, you're hoping that they can provide you some kind of solace and sense that this report went somewhere. To say that one in four people just never came back, just never wanted to cooperate to willingly close the case is unusual.

It's unclear how many of those may have been a case where they were coerced into signing a form or cases where maybe-- There have been instances where people have reported to the police and been told things like, "Is this a case of rape or is it a case of regret?" That's not really going to make you want to move forward with the investigation if you're being doubted and questioned and made to feel even worse and guilty for what happened to you from the bat.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Alison in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alison.

Alison Turkos: Hi, Brian. My name is Alison Turkos and I have been working relentlessly for the past five years to hold the NYPD accountable. In 2017, I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a Lyft driver and taken across state lines, and was sexually assaulted by that driver and two other men. Within 60 hours, I reported to the Brooklyn Special Victims Division. I had a "rape kit" done and I put this in air quotes. I did what we as survivors are told to do. I had a kit done and I talked to Brooklyn Special Victims Division.

Because of callous disregard and gross neglect by Brooklyn Special Victims Division and patrol officers who met me at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, callous disregard and gross neglect, I later filed a lawsuit against the city of New York and the top brass of the NYPD because of gender bias in policing. This isn't to pat myself on the back, but because of that lawsuit and this is why I share my last name because I'm a very public-facing survivor, I then worked to push the DOJ to have to investigate what is happening within the special victims.

What I really want to highlight-- and I'm grateful to folks like Meg, who have really also worked relentlessly to help survivors like myself share our stories. The work that is happening for decades now happens because of survivors like myself who are relatively forced to rip ourselves open and to share our trauma over and over again. We have worked to build collective power and to support one another because we're not finding avenues to do so.

While I'm grateful to DOJ for what they're doing, I don't want it to go unnoticed that survivors like myself and others-- I won't name them because I don't want to disclose, but we have worked so tirelessly to share our stories, file lawsuits. I filed a complaint with CCRB, with the IAB, Internal Affairs Bureau, with the Department of Investigation. Five years later, the people who kidnapped me and sexually assaulted me are still-- the driver still has a TLC license, is still driving a yellow cab, is still driving a rideshare. No charges have been made. No one has been arrested.

Brian Lehrer: Now that I know you're that Alison in Brooklyn, I know that you're quoted in Meg's story on the power of victims banding together leading to this DOJ investigation. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Alison Turkos: About the power of survivors?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Alison Turkos: To be honest, it's my favorite thing to talk about. When I reported in 2017, I had been sexually assaulted twice prior in my life when I was 16 and when I was 18 and I never reported. When I reported in 2017, I felt like I was on an island of my own. I have an incredible support system, but none of my very close friends had ever reported a sexual assault, particularly to a police force like the NYPD.

One of the things that I felt comfort in was finding people who had reported to the NYPD. One of the things that I found is that when I first shared my story in May of 2018 in The Wall Street Journal and I had my photo taken, I used my first and last name. In doing that, I thought that by putting a face and a name to my trauma, it would be harder to ignore. Then what started was that survivors would find me on Twitter or on Instagram or on Facebook and would say, "This happened to me too."

Then we started to see a pattern of similar precincts, similar detectives, similar beat cops. Then I founded what I called the NYPD Survivor Working Group together. We start to support each other in the sense of like you can record cops. These are the things that you can say. You can ask for a copy of your police report, and putting the power back in the hands of survivors to say, "We have nothing to be ashamed of."

The NYPD, Bill de Blasio, former people who are in positions of power. Now, Eric Adams. We as survivors are extraordinary. We as survivors are magic. Society and the NYPD want us to cower and want us to speak in a whisper. It is my goal for survivors to speak with a megaphone and to put the power back in the hands of survivors and to say our collective power together will help, as James Baldwin said, to put sunlight because it's the best disinfectant and to say survivors are doing everything possible to say, "We did nothing wrong and you will not exhaust us out of existence because that is what the NYPD and the city of New York attempt to do."

They attempt to load us with paperwork. They attempt to ensure that we're going to these city hall meetings, trying to have us pass bills, everything. In reality, we just want to live our lives, feed our kids, go out to dinner with our friends, but we can't because the system is trying to exhaust us out of existence. I want to put the power back in the hands of survivors to say, "Y'all are badass and I'm here to support you."

Brian Lehrer: Meg O'Connor from The Appeal, anything else that you want to ask Alison Turkos, who, as I say, was quoted in your article, but here she is and speaking powerfully. I can step back for a minute and let the two of you talk to each other.

Meg O'Connor: Sure. First of all, Alison, you're incredible. Very well-spoken as always. Thank you so much for calling in. Just wanted to make sure that we do take some time to make it clear that the DOJ-- For anyone listening, the DOJ is looking for other people like Alison, who have experienced harm at the hands of the NYPD when they reported the sex crimes. That doesn't have to be, I think, with the Special Victims Division.

There have been people who reported to patrol boroughs, just to regular precincts and had very bad experiences as well. You can get in touch with the DOJ by calling 212-637-2746. If you didn't have time to write that down, you can google DOJ, special victims, NYPD. They do have a press release on their website that has information on how to contact them.

Brian Lehrer: Alison, what's your take-- Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Alison Turkos: No. Please, Brian, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: What's your take on why the NYPD would have an interest in keeping you silent or marginalizing the stories of sexual assault victims rather than being able to boast, "Hey, we're solving these crimes. We're bringing people to justice. We're preventing future crimes through deterrents"? What would be their motivation for treating victims badly in your opinion?

Alison Turkos: I think that question is twofold. I think, one, I myself am a white cis-gendered queer but straight-passing individual. I have an immense amount of privilege. I'm economically privileged. I have education privilege. If this is how the NYPD treated someone like me, how was the NYPD treating victims of sex crimes or as they deem special victims which, again, I don't understand why we are special because they're not treating us special. Again, that's another conversation. If they're treating someone like me who is so privileged, how are they treating trans women of color? How are they treating sex workers? How are they treating undocumented victims?

One of the many reasons why I am so vocal is because, as Brittany Packnett Cunningham taught us, it is a way for me to spend my privilege. I think that is one facet of it. I think the other reason why the NYPD and the city of New York work so diligently to silence us is because they-- and this is something that you see in the defund movement and the abolish police movement, is because they want to tell us that it is one officer. They want to tell us that it's one person and one precinct, but this is something that I speak about constantly is that it is systemic.

In January of 2019, near weeks before I filed my lawsuit, myself, Helen Rosenthal, at that point in time, a city council member, went on a tour with then the commissioner of special victims. Her name is Judith Harrison and we toured multiple NYPD special victims precincts. At that point in time at the Queens precinct of special victims, they were interviewing rape victims in the staff kitchen. When I reported my rape in Brooklyn Special Victims, the hospital neglected to take photos of the bruises on my body left by my rapist. They asked my best friend, Morgan, to take photos in a staff bathroom.

Don't tell me that it is a single officer. It is a systemic problem that they're treating sexual assault and victims of sex crimes horrifically. Again, I use the term "callous disregard." When survivors like myself join together and support each other and start to share our stories and when we connect and say, "I reported in Staten Island. I reported in Brooklyn. I reported in Queens," this isn't just one precinct. It's not just one detective. It's systemic. We cannot allow the system to continuously treat survivors like this. Again, I filed a lawsuit, we reported, and then we had to elevate it to DOJ. Now, ideally, DOJ will do something to hold them accountable.

Brian Lehrer: Alison, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate your voice on the show. I'm going to go right onto another caller, Jane in the Bronx. Jane, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Jane: Hi. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Meg.

Meg O'Connor: Hey, Jane.

Jane: Brian, I am one of the advocates in New York City who works to support the many survivors like Alison, who took action and asked DOJ to intervene in the NYPD's handling of sex crime cases. I have an enormous amount of gratitude to the many survivor leaders who are responsible for this investigation happening and also to the journalists like Meg who brought this issue to public attention.

I want to let you know that I am hearing this week from survivors across the country who are experiencing similar sexism, misogyny, bias in the handling of sex crimes from their police departments. Yesterday, I heard from a survivor in San Francisco. The day before, I heard from a survivor in Chicago, and I could go on. They are saying, "New York City sounds like it has a real problem, but our cities have that problem too." We hope DOJ will have their eyes open to it.

I want to say that I hope the Justice Department, the main headquarters of Justice in Washington, DC, will be on the lookout for other opportunities to help survivors fight back against gender bias and misogyny in policing. There's a natural place where they can start, and that is the cities where they already have pattern-and-practice investigations of police departments already pending right now. Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix, Mount Vernon, all of those cities have opened investigations that the DOJ is conducting.

In all of those cities, survivors have come forward to report really egregious mistreatment by their local police department that is currently under investigation by the DOJ for other issues. What I really hope DOJ will do is include the voices of sexual assault survivors in any pattern-and-practice investigation that they're doing of any police department. Because what I can tell you is my experience as a rape victim advocate with a national focus is that if DOJ looks into the question of gender bias in a given police department, especially one that has other practices that violate civil rights, odds are they're going to find it.

Brian Lehrer: That's really, really interesting, Jane. For example, the Mount Vernon case, also local to our area, our news department helped break that story in the first place, but it did not have to do with this topic. You're saying, "Attention, people who are sexual assault survivors. If there is any kind of federal probe into practices in your local police department going on, register your complaints if you have complaints about how you were treated by that police department in your sexual assault claim in case because it's an opportunity to honor things at the federal level." Am I hearing that right?

Jane: That's exactly right, Brian. Not only can that kind of initiative come from survivors themselves, but it can and should come from DOJ. In any city, the DOJ already has a presence. They should be reaching out to rape crisis centers. They should be reaching out to victim advocacy organizations. To the extent that they can reach out directly to survivors who have gone public in those cities, they should be doing that. They should be looking to see if these kinds of problems exist in those cities. Because I can tell you, in the four cities that DOJ is already investigating, those problems are severe and entrenched over a long period of time and they are there to be found.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, what are the remedies that you're hoping for from the federal Department of Justice? What can they actually do about this to make it better for future survivors?

Jane: What a great question. The Justice Department has told advocates and survivors that this investigation is going to go on for a period of months. At the end of that period of months, DOJ will release its findings as to whether it has or has not uncovered systemic bias against sex crime survivors. If they do find such bias exists, then they have the opportunity to seek a consent decree with the NYPD. That consent decree is like a settlement agreement.

It is something that both sides would enter into in lieu of the Justice Department actually going to court and suing the NYPD for civil rights violations. In the course of negotiating that kind of consent decree, the Justice Department has the opportunity to require certain conditions of the NYPD. What I hope is that those conditions will address the long-standing issues that survivors and advocates and police officers and prosecutors and journalists have been speaking out about for years and even decades.

That is, number one, we hope they'll require adequate staffing of the Special Victims Division. We hope they'll require adequate training for the detectives to go there. We hope they'll require that the detectives go there, be experienced detectives, and not white shields who have literally never investigated a petty larceny before, let alone a first-degree rape. We hope that they will require the kind of culture change from the top that treats rape cases as high priority and not low-priority cases to be brushed off with a dishonestly, engineered victim withdrawal agreement.

We hope that all these kinds of issues that you've been hearing about in the news are going to be addressed in this specific term of a consent decree that DOJ will enter into with the NYPD. We hope that the ultimate long-term goal of that is a sex crime division that is properly staffed, properly trained, that prioritizes trauma-informed interactions with victims, and that prioritizes investigating and apprehending dangerous perpetrators of sexual assault and child abuse.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. We're going to get one more person's story on here. It's Schela in Montclair, who just called in a few minutes ago. Schela, I definitely want to get your voice on the show, but we are running out of time in the segment. We're going to have to keep it to about two minutes. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Schela Hilaire Hall: Hello, thank you for taking my call. My name is Schela Hilaire Hall. I'm proud to say my name because I'm not a victim anymore. I was assaulted by a gynecologist in South Orange. I reported the crime four days later. The chief made sure that I would not come back. I came back four years later. That's how long it took me. When I came back, they had never filed the reports. It was very difficult to get justice. I went to court on my own. They tried to deter me from doing it, but I continued. I sued the town of South Orange. I did not win, but all the information is recorded and Kathleen O'Brien--

Brian Lehrer: Do you see a connection between the issues with the NYPD that we've been talking about mostly here and whatever your experience was in South Orange, New Jersey?

Schela Hilaire Hall: Yes, it's a national problem. The people that are working in the police department are very connected to some of the people that have committed the crime. They are insensitive. They are uncomfortable talking about sexual assault. Even if they have received training, it's been so long that you don't know how to act with a woman who comes to them and is talking about sexual assault because they see their daughters, they see their moms. They're very often men and they don't know what to do. I think that training needs to be repeated as often as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for your call. I'm sorry. We didn't have more time for you. Meg O'Connor from The Appeal, who wrote up this story as other news organizations did, but she did it particularly well for The Appeal, which covers prosecutors and criminal justice in America of the Justice Department at the federal level investigating the NYPD's Sexual Victims Division now. Meg, after hearing people's stories, where do we go from here? How quickly can we expect anything from the Justice Department or anything else you want to say as we wrap it up?

Meg O'Connor: Sure, yes. Well, it won't be quick. It will probably be about a year that they will be investigating this before they release a findings letter. I would also say, as Jane pointed out, as Alison pointed out, this is a systemic issue and it is not for lack of resources. The NYPD has, I think, a $5 billion budget, a budget bigger than some countries. It is a matter of choice to staff the division the way that it has to train people the way that they have.

It's the Special Victims Division that we're talking about, but the choices are made by the NYPD, by the NYPD commissioner, the chief of detectives, and the mayor. This is a cultural problem where police officers simply don't take rape seriously, not just in New York but across the country, and it raises the question of whether this should actually be handled by police at all.

Brian Lehrer: Meg O'Connor, report-- Well, okay, since you said that provocative thing there going out the door, what's the alternative? Because I'm sure some people are thinking, "Well, does this run counter to the 'defund the police' movement or alternatives to policing movement that some progressives lean in on?" Our callers who are advocates and survivors have been saying the NYPD understaffs this department. If not police, how else do you bring sexual assaulters to justice in 30 seconds?

Meg O'Connor: Well, I would definitely say that this is not a situation that calls for more funding or more staffing for police because, again, they have a budget larger than some countries. It is a choice to only have 67 detectives investigating sexual assault, but thousands of people stopping churro ladies and turnstile jumpers. There is a movement right now to civilianize some functions of the police department, to move functions out of the police department. In Berkeley, they moved their transportation enforcement out of the-- Police no longer handle traffic enforcement. That is something handled by a civilian department.

Brian Lehrer: With respect to sexual assault?

Meg O'Connor: That is a very good question and something that I think would take a lot of work to answer.

Brian Lehrer: Complicated for a discussion for a later day.

Meg O'Connor: Yes, I don't know what that would look like, but there is some interest from survivors for restorative justice models. There are some survivors out there who do still want an arrest and prosecution. They want to see the person who harmed them in jail. It's a very complicated question and there will be many different answers from many different people who are stakeholders here.

Brian Lehrer: Meg O'Connor, reporter covering police and prosecutors at The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the US criminal legal system. Thanks so much for coming on with us today. We really appreciate it.

Meg O'Connor: Thanks so much for having me.

 

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