New cop misconduct alleged: 4th drug officer off street; women cite groping

Tolstoy was put back on the street "because the direction of the investigation led us to believe it was OK at the time," DiLacqua said.

DiLacqua declined to say what had prompted the October 2008 removal of Tolstoy, but sources familiar with the case say it happened after a woman complained of sexual misconduct.

The Daily News was unable to find the woman who sparked the Internal Affairs investigation. But Daily News reporters knocked on doors or made calls to roughly 100 homes raided by Tolstoy and fellow squad members in 2007 and 2008, and found at least 12 women who said the officers degraded and demeaned them.

Denise Thompson, 48, of West Philadelphia, said an officer, whom she described as white and stocky with brown hair, took her alone to an upstairs bedroom when a house on Redfield Street was raided last August.

"He asked me what my chest size was," said Thompson, who was wearing a white low-cut dress at the time of the raid. "I said, 'What has that got to do with anything?' "

"I thought it was sexual harassment," she said.

In a June 2008 raid of a Northeast Philly home, a female occupant said that four male officers barreled into her bedroom, even though her husband had told them she was upstairs asleep, naked.

The woman, then 30, did not want her name made public because she was embarrassed and afraid. She said she gripped the bed covers to her chest when one of the officers, whom she described as white, with a big belly, scruffy brown hair and a small goatee, forcibly yanked them from her.

"I kept telling him, 'I'm not dressed. I'm not dressed,' " said the woman. "But he was adamant about getting the covers off. The way he ripped my covers off, it was like vicious. I thought something was going to happen."

She reached for her clothes and turned to dress with her back to the cops, but the officer who pulled the covers ordered her to turn around. She stood naked before them. She was so scared that she put her clothes on inside out, she said.

The officers sent the woman downstairs, where she said she heard them chuckling in her bedroom. After they left, she found her personal items, including what she called "sex toys," strewn around the room. An item of her lingerie - a black leather teddy - had been taken from a drawer and laid out on top of her dresser, she said.

"It was creepy," she said. "They didn't physically touch me, but I felt violated."

She said that she never complained to Internal Affairs because she feared retaliation.

Police arrested her 35-year-old husband for allegedly selling a small amount of prescription pills. The case is pending. The woman was not charged. The couple has no prior criminal record.

"I'll never get that day out of my head," the woman said. "Ever since this happened, I don't sleep. I'm not comfortable in my house . . . I felt like all my dignity had been stripped from me."