New Focus in Sex-Assault Cases

• By SEAN GARDINER

A committee chosen by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to study how his department handles sex offenses has made six recommendations aimed at decreasing the number of misclassified complaints and increasing officer sensitivity when dealing with victims.

The committee, called the Sex Crimes Working Group, was convened in April after sex-crime victim advocate groups and rape counselors said they believed many rape and sexual-assault complaints were being classified as lesser crimes or reports weren't being taken at all.

Harriet Lessel, executive director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, said her organization, an advocacy group for rape-crisis programs, had reached out to Mr. Kelly. She said rape-crisis programs were concerned that anecdotal evidence they collected suggested some sexual-assault reports weren't being taken, especially by patrol officers.

"We found that people, in all five boroughs, were having a hard time reporting sexual assaults," she said.

Paul Browne, the NYPD's spokesman, said that over the past nine months the NYPD has conducted an audit of 1,922 sex-crime cases. Of those, police found the charges in 19 cases were misclassified and needed to be corrected, he said.

Mr. Browne said Mr. Kelly has "accepted all of the recommendations and is moving forward in coming weeks with expanded training and the assignment of the additional detectives to Special Victims."

According to a copy of the committee's report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the committee recommended that all sexual-assault complaints be assigned to Special Victims Division (SVD) detectives who are specially trained in sex-crime investigations. Currently, sexual-assault complaints are also handled by patrol officers.

The committee members believe the change will lead to a decrease in the number of sex-crime misclassifications, the recommendations state.

The committee also suggested having SVD investigators respond to interview victims being treated in hospitals. Currently, patrol officers respond to hospital sex-crime victim calls. The committee found that prosecutors, medical professionals and victim advocates have complained that patrol officers often fail to demonstrate the proper sensitivity when dealing with sex-crime complainants.

To do this, the SVD will have to add more investigators. Mr. Browne said the number of new detectives moved into the sex-crimes unit will number in the dozens.

The committee also recommended increasing cooperation with prosecutors, reorganizing the staffing of the SVD, enhancing officer training for all SVD investigators and NYPD officers and having Mr. Kelly meet regularly with victims' advocates groups for feedback on the department's efforts.

"I think those are really pretty basic and are all obviously good answers," Ms. Lessel said of the committee's recommendations.

The committee includes four police officials and Denise O'Donnell, who quit her cabinet post in February as the New York State Deputy Secretary for Public Safety in protest, saying that Gov. David Paterson's involvement in a domestic-violence case involving one of his aides was unacceptable. Earlier this month, Ms. O'Donnell was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

In 2009, rape complaints in the city dipped to a modern-day low of 1,206. This year the city is on target for a 16% increase, to about 1,400 reported rapes. It would be the first increase in rapes since Mr. Kelly became police commissioner, for the second time, in 2002.

Write to Sean Gardiner at sean.gardiner@wsj.com