STRIP SEARCH BASED ON FLIMSY EVIDENCE

Imagine you're out for some innocent entertainment at a restaurant,
bar, or movie theatre, when police burst in and order everyone into
the middle of the room. Once staff and patrons have been corralled,
police lead them, one at a time, to their respective washrooms.

When your turn comes, the officer orders you to strip. Finding
nothing, the officer lets you go.

Most Canadians would consider this a humiliating ordeal, an intrusion
into the most intimate aspect of their humanity.

Halifax Regional Police spokesman Const. Frank Bowes considers it a
case of officers doing their job, "and doing it properly."

That's how he described the January raid on a Halifax dance hall where
50 staff, many of them teenagers, were strip-searched, then released
when nothing of significance turned up.

Free societies have long recognized that a search of one's premises,
let alone of one's body, constitutes a deeply offensive invasion of
privacy.

In Canada, the law restricting police use of such tactics is enshrined
in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 8 of which guarantees,
"the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure."

Before police can carry out a search, they must persuade a justice of
the peace they have reasonable and probable grounds to believe a crime
has been committed, and evidence of that crime is concealed at the
location they intend to search.

Halifax police went through the motions of obtaining a search warrant
before their Jan. 29 raid, but it was an empty exercise. Justice of
the peace Alan Weeks should never have authorized a search based on
the flimsy evidence presented to him, and nothing in the warrant he
did issue could conceivably justify the repugnant actions of the police.

Const. Andrew Pattison had three sources for his application:

* Source "A," described as a paid informant of proven reliability who
associates with drug traffickers and whose tips had been used to
obtain search warrants, told police Const. James Perrin that
organizers of raves - not any particular rave, but raves in general -
"are trafficking in the drug commonly referred to as ecstasy."

* Source "B," described as "a confidential source of unknown
reliability," informed Pattison a rave would take place on Jan. 29 at
The Underground. This must have come as a bombshell; fliers
advertising the event were plastered on every downtown utility pole.
Source "B" also claimed to know of people trafficking in ecstasy at
previous raids held at The Undergound - he didn't say who or when -
and said "a number of people" would be doing so at the Jan. 29 event.
He didn't say who, or how he knew.

* Source "C" told Staff Sgt. Robert Kennedy that he had seen "rave
organizer" Wayne Mitchell put a jar of what "C" knew to be ecstasy
above a ceiling tile over The Underground's dance floor. He also
claimed to have seen Mitchell place about 200 five-gram vials of the
date rape drug GHB above the ceiling tiles.

Pattison discovered Mitchell has an 11-year-old conviction for
conspiracy to traffic in a narcotic. He didn't say what narcotic.

As justification for police infringement of a constitutionally
guaranteed right, this is thin gruel.

Only one of the three informants could be characterized as reliable,
and his information amounted merely to general knowledge, or more
accurately, speculation.

The reliability of the only informant claiming hard information was,
by Pattison's own admission, unknown. "C" didn't say how he knew the
jar contained ecstasy, what form the drug was in, what the jar looked
like, or where the ceiling tile was located. Nor did he say how he
knew Mitchell, or what the 200-plus vials of GHB looked like.

All these vague tips from unknown informants of uncertain reliability
fall well short of the specific, reliable information police should
produce to meet the Constitutional standard of "reasonable and
probable" grounds.

And even if it did justify a search of ceiling tiles, none of it would
warrant the intrusive, humiliating body searches of the 50 people
found there.

Only Mitchell was even named in the warrant. The putative object of
the search - a jar of ecstasy and 200 vials of GHB - couldn't be
secreted on anyone's body.

Police laid no charges; they found only a few grams of marijuana and
"a handful" of unidentified pills.

Search any random 50 Canadian citizens, and chances are you'll find a
few unidentified pills. Search any random 50 teenagers out for a
Saturday night dance, and chances are you'll find a bag or two of marijuana.

Law enforcement might be easier if police could legally search any
citizen at random, or because they fall within a certain age group, or
because they attend certain kinds of dances, but we don't allow that.

In this case, 50 innocent citizens were subjected to an obnoxious
ordeal by a police force that was grotesquely overreaching. Halifax
police should stop defending these outrageous tactics. Failing that,
the offended youngsters should sue the city.