REPORT POINTS TO BIAS IN CUSTOMS DRUG SEARCHES

Black Women Targets Most Often On Flights

WASHINGTON - U.S. Customs Service officials ordered black American women
returning home from overseas to remove their clothes or undergo X-rays much
more often than other passengers, even though their searches were less
likely to reveal illegal hidden drugs, a report says.

Only a fraction of 1 percent of the 71.5 million passengers were singled
out for searches as they entered the United States on international flights
in fiscal year 1998. And the vast majority of those 52,455 passengers were
subjected to simple pat-downs, according to the report by the General
Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, obtained by The Associated
Press.

The report, requested by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is to be released today.

Of those, black women were selected for more intrusive searches -- strip
searches or X-rays -- more than any other group. White men and women alike
also had a high likelihood of being strip-searched, and black men were
chosen more often than most other passengers to be X-rayed.

Black women were much less likely than the others to be found with illegal
drugs, the report said.

"Although searched passengers with certain characteristics were subject to
more intrusive searches, they were not always more likely to be found
carrying contraband," the GAO said.

As allegations of abusive searches surfaced over the past two years, the
Customs Service has made repeated efforts to change how passengers are
checked for drugs. The agency faces numerous lawsuits alleging people were
singled out for body searches because of their race or sex, including an
move by almost 100 black women to file a class-action suit in Chicago.

Customs officials said changes, most enacted after the period studied by
the GAO, already are yielding results not reflected in the report. For
instance, fewer intrusive searches are being conducted, but more are
resulting in drug seizures.

"We don't necessarily disagree with the report," Customs Commissioner
Raymond Kelly said in an interview. "The intimation is a bit outdated. I
think we've taken the problem head-on."

For instance, X-rays conducted in 1998 found drugs almost twice as often on
white men and women and black men as on black women. And strip searches
that year uncovered drugs on Hispanics and black men at much higher rates
than on black women.

Also, black women who were U.S. citizens were nine times as likely as white
American women to be X-rayed but less than half as likely to be concealing
illegal drugs.

Such searches are intended to catch smugglers who swallow drug packets or
hide cocaine or heroin inside clothing or in body cavities. The searches
usually begin with a pat-down and, with reasonable suspicion, can proceed
to a strip search, an X-ray, monitored bowel movement or a body cavity search.