Long Beach Could Lose Convention Over Rape Incidents : Crime: The local chapter of the National Organization for Women cites city inaction and an increase in reported rapes.

Since January, the Long Beach chapter of the National Organization for Women has been after the city to deal more aggressively with an increase in reported rapes. Add a sexual assault response team to help police, they asked. Mail out information pamphlets in utility bills. Sponsor an annual forum on violence against women.

“The council simply received and filed the request and took no action,” said chapter president Gerrie Schipske.

On Wednesday--one day after the arrest of an alleged serial rapist--NOW’s Long Beach chapter notified national headquarters that it wanted to take Long Beach’s name out of the running to host the organizations’s 1992 national convention, which could have drawn as many as 4,000 members to the tourism-minded city.

“We just did not feel comfortable,” Schipske said, “hosting a convention that is 98% women in an area where there is a high incidence of rape and assault against women.”

Though withdrawal from the convention competition already had been under discussion, the arrest on Tuesday of a 16-year-old suspect in a series of gunpoint rapes and robberies in the prosperous Belmont Heights neighborhood helped cement NOW’s decision, said Schipske.

In the latest rape case, investigators arrested a 16-year-old suspect at his home just before the family was to move, police said.

The muscular teen-ager--who was said to ride around town on a bicycle and wear a Cincinnati Bengals jacket--could be tried as an adult on as many as 25 felonies, from rape and kidnaping to robbery, police said Wednesday. They have recovered what they believe to be the handgun used in the attacks.

The arrest Tuesday, four days after the last of the attacks, was welcome news for a Police Department with a record for solving serious crimes that was shown by 1990 state figures to rank below statewide averages.

But to Schipske, it was too little too late.

NOW’s letter to its national headquarters cites 1990 statistics showing a 23.8% rise in reported rapes in Long Beach, as well as the recent series of rapes in the Belmont Heights area, as its reasons for backing out of the offer to bid on sponsoring the convention.

“We will continue working to make our city safer for women who live, work and visit,” Schipske wrote, and “will be able to accept the invitation in the future.”

City and police officials were not available for comment on NOW’s action late Wednesday.

“We were concerned that the department was not taking this crime seriously,” Schipske said, “and we had complaints from community members that their calls for assistance were not taken seriously and they were sometimes mishandled.”

Julie Dodge, director of the rape crisis hot line in Long Beach, defended the department.

“National studies have shown the number of assaults has not really increased,” she said. Rather, what has increased is “the people who come forward and report” rapes.

Long Beach is “no higher, no lower than the city of Los Angeles” in per-capita rape statistics, she said, and its rate for solving rapes is up by more than 5% in 1990, to 42.6%.

“They’ve done, I think, some really outstanding work. We have found their sex crimes unit to be very competent, and as far as sensitivity goes, some of them are probably better than some of our (counselors),” Dodge said.

The rape suspect was spotted by police last Friday afternoon, the day after the last attack and the day that a composite drawing was distributed.

Police said they did not notify residents of a serial rapist because, after the first rape on Feb. 21, they didn’t know they had one. Nearly 10 days passed between the first and the second rapes.

“Then we got clobbered,” said Sgt. C.S. Roberson--four more rapes and one attempt on March 4, 5 and 7.

On Friday, as two plainclothes officers staked out another suspect, a sex-offender parolee, the 16-year-old happened to whiz by on a bike. He saw the officers. They saw him--the jacket that allegedly had been described by victims, the matching haircut. He dumped the bike and took off running, said Sgt. Bob Gillissie of Long Beach police’s career criminal detail.

He lost his pursuers, but police caught up with him on Tuesday.