BLACK WOMEN SEARCHED MORE, STUDY FINDS

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- United States Customs officials ordered black American
women returning home from overseas to remove their clothes for a search or
undergo X-rays much more often than other airline passengers, even though
the searches were less likely to reveal hidden illegal drugs, a government
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
the 1998 fiscal year. And most of those 52,455 passengers were subjected to
simple pat-downs, according to the report by the General Accounting Office,
the investigative arm of Congress.

The report will be released on Monday.

Black women were selected for more intrusive searches -- strip-searches or
X-rays -- than any other group. Whites also faced a high likelihood of
strip-searches, and black men were chosen more often than most passengers to
have X-rays.

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

The Customs Service has tried to change how passengers are checked for
drugs. The agency faces numerous lawsuits by people who say they were
singled out for body searches because of their race or sex.

Customs officials said the changes were already yielding results. For
instance, fewer intrusive searches are being conducted, but more are
resulting in drug seizures.