How many billions does NYPD need to catch rapists?
Earlier this month, a woman was raped in Lower Manhattan by the Hudson River. The tourist, visiting from Illinois, was so brutally strangled that bones in her neck broke.
Her alleged attacker, Carl Phanor, was already known to the NYPD. He’d been linked to two previous sexual assaults in the area. But each time, he’d managed to evade the richest police force in the world.
“The park has 197 cameras accessible to the Police Department,” the New York Times observed, in a smart investigation that should be front page news but is totally buried on the website. Despite tracking his movements using surveillance footage and monitoring the stolen cell phones, officers failed to apprehend him for more than half a year—enough time for him to rape at least two more women.
So what did they do once they had identified a potential violent rapist?
After the first attack in March, investigators conducted a thorough search, police officials said, relying on surveillance video that showed the suspect’s movements. Investigators also tried to track him by using the victim’s phone and inspected piers by land and sea. After DNA swabbed from the first victim matched Mr. Phanor’s sample in a state database in April, investigators blasted his photo to officers’ cellphones and looked for him in homeless shelters.
They could not locate him, Chief of Detectives James W. Essig said, perhaps because he was hiding in construction sites and leaving the city after each attack. But they are unsure whether he ever left. Mr. Phanor’s relatives upstate told investigators that they had not seen him in many years, Mr. Essig said.
“We were hoping he would get picked up on something else, that it would hit with his print match to this,” Mr. Essig said. “But he never got picked up for anything except these three.”
It seems like, “We were hoping the violent rapist would just fall into our laps” is not the best strategy?
Police were further flummoxed when the criminal mastermind … shaved his eyebrows?
[NYPD Chief of Detectives James] Essig noted that Phanor had already changed his appearance at this point by shaving off his eyebrows.
“He looks different. It’s so difficult to be going down the street and say, ‘Oh, that’s the guy in this photo.’ It’s just a very, very difficult thing,” Essig said. “When a transient person [is] like this, especially when they change their appearance and they have fictitious names, which he did give us when we stopped him, [they] are very hard to locate.”
In the second quarter of 2022, officers in Manhattan cleared just 42 percent of “forcible rapes” and 36 percent of “expanded” rapes (“expanded” rape is their way to mark sexual assaults that fit the FBI definition of rape, which is forcible penetration by any organ or object. Forcible rape refers to forcible vaginal penetration).
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