By William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times
The independent city agency that investigates accusations of police abuse said yesterday that it had found evidence suggesting that officers may frequently be conducting inappropriate strip searches. It also said that officers and their supervisors are often unaware of Police Department procedures governing such searches.
The agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, based its concerns on dozens of complaints of improper strip searches filed since 2002, and reviewed in detail more than a dozen, mostly by narcotics officers, that it had found to be improper. The board detailed 10 substantiated complaints from four boroughs as part of a recommendation that the department increase training on when strip searches may be conducted.
All but one of the cases detailed in the recommendation involved people who had been arrested for petty crimes, including making too much noise, disorderly conduct and drug possession. In most instances, they told board investigators that they had been ordered to strip to their underwear or strip completely. Some said they had been ordered to squat or bend over. And in all of the cases, the officers or supervisors who ordered or performed the searches told the review board investigators that they believed the searches had been appropriate, and in most cases routine. The board did not release the names of the complainants because such files are confidential under law.
The agency said it was concerned because even though the overall number of accusations of improper strip searches is relatively small - 65 last year and 32 so far this year - in most cases, officers and often supervisors told board investigators that others in their commands routinely conducted the kind of searches that the board found violate the police Patrol Guide, a compendium of department procedures. Sixteen of 85 strip-search complaints, made between Jan. 1, 2002, and April 1, 2004, have been substantiated.
The board said it undertook the study because it determined in January that strip search complaints were substantiated roughly twice as often as other complaints it investigates. They include the use of excessive force and offensive language, discourtesy and other types of abuse of authority.
The training recommendation, announced at yesterday’s board meeting by the chairman, Hector Gonzalez, was contained in a letter from the executive director, Florence L. Finkle, to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. It included a summary of the 10 cases that the board detailed. Disciplinary action was taken in one of the 10 cases, even though three others are more than a year old.
The department’s chief spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, acknowledged that the review highlighted training shortfalls, “including familiarity with the Patrol Guide and the ability to properly articulate the reasons for a search.” The department is developing a new training video, he said, “that reinforces instruction on when such searches are permissible and when they are not.” He said the officers in the cases reviewed were not abusive and did not intentionally violate department procedures.
The board’s review was not the first time that the department’s strip-search practices have come under scrutiny. A federal lawsuit filed in 2001 contends that officers in Brooklyn central booking routinely violated people’s rights by strip-searching people arrested on misdemeanor charges and lesser offenses in front of crowds of prisoners. The lawsuit depicts a parade of ordinary New Yorkers caught up in morass of degradation after being arrested for petty crimes. Late last year, a judge ruled that the lawsuit could continue not only on behalf of the people who filed it, but also on behalf of all others with similar complaints.
The review board’s training recommendation does not find fault with the manner in which the searches were conducted, but with the fact that they were conducted at all. The Patrol Guide, following state and federal law, requires that to conduct a strip search, an officer must have reasonable suspicion that the person under arrest is concealing weapons, contraband or evidence that might not be discovered by frisking him, or through the more thorough search that is routinely conducted when an arrested person is brought into a police building.
The recommendation said the officers’ failure to follow Patrol Guide procedures might result in the violation of constitutional rights, the suppression of evidence in criminal cases and civil liability.
“They didn’t hide what they did when they were interviewed at the C.C.R.B.,” said one board official involved in the inquiry. “They believed that what they were doing was consistent with department policies, and their own statements and actions reflected a profound misunderstanding of the department’s policies.”
The searches involved officers assigned to narcotics units in northern and southern Queens, northern Brooklyn, East Harlem and the Bronx, the 13th Precinct in Manhattan and a housing gang unit in the Bronx.
Ms. Finkle, the board’s executive director, said the training recommendation underscored her agency’s ability to uncover and collect information on department practices during its investigations into complaints of police abuse - even cases that are not substantiated - and synthesize them into valuable policy guidance for the department. “These types of recommendations,” she said, “can have a lasting impact on police policies.”
But several civil liberties lawyers who have handled strip-search cases said the review board’s findings were evidence of a much more widespread problem. Richard J. Cardinale, one of the lawyers who brought the 2001 lawsuit, said abusive searches were common in narcotics commands, where groups of suspects are often processed together. “They just line them up in a cell and say, ‘Get naked and squat,’ ” he said.
Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said his group’s investigation into complaints of strip searches suggest that the cases cited by the review board represent “examples of a much larger problem.”