On one wall a bulletin board displays a scientific technique that the former commander, Deputy Chief Michael Osgood, introduced for interviewing traumatized victims to help elicit more reliable testimony. Facing it is a second board that holds newspaper clippings touting the major cases solved under his long tenure.
The long shadow of Osgood’s successes is not the only hurdle Harrison faces. She has taken over the unit at a critical time when the Police Department has come under fire for its handling of sex-crime cases, and she has never before overseen a large investigative bureau.
“I like a challenge,” Harrison said as she settled in a chair in her office. “I believe in this work.”
Last year, a city watchdog agency found that severe staff shortages left detectives too overworked to properly investigate cases. Rape reports jumped more than 22 percent last year, an extraordinary spike that victim advocates have said was primarily driven by #MeToo, stretching detectives even thinner.
The Department of Investigation found that police leadership had prioritized rapes committed by strangers over those committed by victims’ acquaintances on the assumption that strangers were more dangerous. It also said that some detectives had been insensitive, dismissive and incredulous toward victims.
The report echoed the accounts of some victims, who have said the police failed to investigate their cases. The auditors laid the blame on the department’s top brass for not heeding requests for more resources from Osgood and the recommendations of a 2010 working group.
The police rejected the most critical findings in the report but implemented some of its recommendations.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill removed Osgood in November and put Harrison in his place. Until his removal, Osgood had enjoyed the support of the city’s main victim-advocate groups, who said at the time they suspected he was being pushed out because he had helped the DOI with its negative report.
Harrison is the first black officer to lead the Special Victims Division, but that powerful precedent has been tempered in police circles by worries that her lack of experience with investigations could hamper her. A police officer for more than 21 years, she has never worked as a detective or run an investigative division.
“She’s behind the eight ball, and she has very big hurdles to go over,” said one veteran police commander who did not want to be named critiquing the commissioner. “She’ll be at the mercy of the detectives below her. Most of them will not be honest with her.”
Still, Harrison, who worked for four years as the commanding officer of two precincts in Queens, the 112th and then the 109th, said her selection was about more than identity politics.
She said her approach would be informed by all of the times as a precinct commander that she had responded to sexual assaults and handled chaotic crime scenes, while simultaneously directing arrests and caring for victims.
“I didn’t get the position because I’m black or female,” she said. “I think that my reputation precedes me. And I know that. I’m a hard worker, I’m a quick learner.”
As a supervisor, Harrison earned a reputation as an accessible leader with a sense of mission. Community leaders said she was skilled at working with residents to solve local problems and always stressed to them that she worked for the public.
“She meant that,” said Alfredo Centola, president of the Whitestone Civic Association, which regularly met with Harrison when she was the commander of the 109th Precinct. “You saw it. You felt it. You knew it.”
Maureen Curtis, who oversees criminal justice and court programs for Safe Horizon, a nonprofit serving crime victims, said Harrison’s lack of experience in investigations might not hinder her. Other police leaders have had success without experience in the areas they worked, she noted.
“The best leadership in NYPD were those that could earn and maintain the respect of the officers they’re supervising, as well as interact in a meaningful way with the communities,” she said. “Those are the ones who will effect change.”
Two weeks ago, the department began quarterly CompStat meetings for Special Victims cases. O’Neill said the effort was aimed at treating sex crimes and child abuse as seriously as murder and robbery.
Still, one of the biggest hurdles facing Harrison is a continuing shortage of staff. The report, which was released before last year’s spike in rape reports, recommended doubling the size of the division’s sex-crimes squads by adding 74 investigators. Only about 55 investigators have been added so far, bringing the total to 129, including many officers who are working provisionally as detectives.
Harrison said she had pressed her superiors for more investigators.
“We need people, and that’s forthcoming,” Harrison said. “I think everybody wants to see Special Victims succeed, and to that end, they’re going to give us what we need to be able to do our jobs effectively.”
Harrison must also navigate without some of the tools Osgood utilized. Top Police Department leaders shut down some of the specialized squads he had set up, including one that was investigating some 8,000 stranger rapes that had gone cold and another that was drilling down on drug-facilitated assaults.
Harrison said those cases were still being investigated, but some former members of the division said it would be impossible for investigators to give those cases the time they needed while also handling regular caseloads and helping new detectives.
Eusebio Santos, a retired detective who worked on the drug-facilitated assaults team until his retirement in December, called the end of that specialized squad disheartening.
“It was important to have a unit like this, to be able to slow things and really give the extra attention that some of these cases deserve,” Santos said, “especially when it’s not clear-cut.”
One help for the new commander has been the department’s investment in upgrading the offices where victims meet detectives. One center under construction in lower Manhattan will allow the police in the borough’s sex-crimes squad to work in the same space as nurses trained to treat sexual assault victims, prosecutors, victim advocates and service providers. It is slated to open this year and is modeled after a successful facility in Philadelphia.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Harrison, however, is reversing a perception among some victims and advocate groups that the division’s investigators, despite the heightened awareness about sexual assault since the #MeToo movement, still have outmoded ideas about rape that discourage victims from moving forward with their cases.
A number of rape victims have complained that investigators treated them with unnecessary skepticism and that their cases languished for months, especially when the accused knows the victim.
Two women, Alison Turkos and Jennifer Welch Demski, charged in court papers that the Police Department had failed to take rape seriously because its masculine culture was biased against women, who made up the majority of sexual assault victims. The Police Department, the women said in the filing, showed “a fundamental disregard for both how sex crimes occur and the debilitating, life-altering harm they cause.”
Turkos, for instance, reported she had been kidnapped and raped by a Lyft driver in October 2017. In an interview, she said that her case had sat for seven months in the hands of a troubled detective who once interrupted an interview about the attack to check a cellphone notification from an app reminding her to drink water. The FBI is investigating the attack because Turkos was taken across state lines, but it has not been solved.
“When someone or something or an institution or a system continuously lets you down, or fails you, it’s hard for me to have faith,” she said.
Since assuming command, Harrison has said her goal is to restore rape victims’ faith in the police and to make the division a place where victims and their trauma are at the center of every decision, from the color of the wall paint to staffing decisions. For her, the measure of success will be when victims feel that coming forward to the police is not a mistake, regardless of whether there is an arrest.
“I want them to feel under my watch, ‘Come forward, we’re not going to re-victimize you,'” she said. “We’re going to respect you, and we’re going to try to help you regain the pieces of your life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.