Parade Unsafe, but Central Park Isn’t, New Yorkers Insist

Kathryn Turner left Manhattan last weekend to avoid the mayhem she says traditionally accompanies the annual Puerto Rican Day parade. But as the 34-year-old New York resident sunbathed and her golden retriever Cairo dozed under a blanket of leafy trees in Central Park this weekend, she said last week’s attacks on a number of women would not stop her twice-daily trips to the park.

“Rarely do I feel unsafe in this park,” she said. “That parade is an excuse to have a party and be crazy.”

Women who ran, read and roller-bladed in the park agreed that it was last week’s event, rather than the park, that seemed unsafe. “I feel pretty safe here with so many people and families around,” said Jessica Schafer, a 19-year-old college student who ate lunch and strolled Sunday through Central Park with a friend.

Police initially reported that a crowd of about 25 young men had robbed, stripped or groped six women, including a French tourist on her honeymoon and three teenage girls visiting from England.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani defended the police by pointing to statistics that crime was down in New York.

But Anne Peyton Bryant, a 29-year-old kickboxer, said last Monday that she had reported to three police officers that she had been attacked and they did nothing. Dozens of women soon contacted the police and media outlets, saying that they had been attacked in or around the park as well.

Giuliani quickly backed down by calling the attacks “horrendous,” offering to meet with victims and offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who could provide information on the suspects.

By this weekend, police said that 50 women between the ages of 14 and 40 reported that they had been attacked. With the help of videotapes that some park visitors had taken, police have arrested 16 men and charged them with sexual abuse, robbery and, in one case, assault. Snapshots of 20 more suspects have appeared on local news shows and papers and on posters across the city. Police are looking for another 16 perpetrators, said Marilyn Mode, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public affairs. And she said police are “rigorously investigating” charges that the police failed to help these victims.

The attacks have only intensified criticism of the New York Police Department with notices of lawsuits filed and comparisons drawn to the shooting of an unarmed West African immigrant and the wilding incident of 1989 in which a gang of youths beat up joggers.

Two 21-year-old roommates from Somerset, N.J., Ashanna Cover and Josina Lawrence, say they plan to sue the city for $5 million each.

At Al Sharpton’s weekly rally on Saturday, Cover and Lawrence said they told a crowd of officers that they had been attacked. But Cover said tearfully that one officer was “just smiling and giggling” and said that he had to direct traffic. The women returned home to Somerset and reported the incident to police, who forwarded the complaints to the New York police. But these women never told the Police Department their complaints had been ignored, Mode said.