CUSTOMS LIMITING DRUG SEARCHES OF AIRLINE PASSENGERS

Travel: Screening curbs come on heels of at least 12 lawsuits, including a
class-action case on behalf of 100 black women, filed against federal service.

WASHINGTON - Caught in the fierce controversy over "racial profiling," the
U.S. Customs Service is imposing new limits on its screening of airline
passengers to intercept illicit drug shipments.

Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Wednesday that the agency, which
seeks to catch contraband entering the country, no longer will detain
airline travelers suspected of smuggling narcotics for more than four hours
without specific approval of a federal magistrate.

It also will require Customs officers to notify an attorney or friend of
the passenger, if asked to do so, when the traveler is detained for more
than two hours. In cases where no drugs are found, the agency will help
travelers to resume their journeys when their trips have been disrupted.

The changes come as the Customs Service is facing at least a dozen lawsuits
filed by angry passengers, including a classaction suit in Chicago on
behalf of 100 black women who claim that they were singled out and searched
because of their race and gender.

Customs officials conducted searches of more than 50,000 international
travelers, from pat-downs to strip searches, in fiscal 1998, the service said.

Top Customs officials are vowing to base such searches on concrete evidence
or specific intelligence, rather than singling out people based on race and
appearance. Experience shows that certain flights from certain foreign
countries carry a higher risk of smugglers, they said.

The new measures mark "a sharp departure from past practice and represent a
self-imposed restraint on Customs search authority, which federal courts
have always liberally upheld," Kelly said.

The Supreme Court, in fact, has ruled that Customs officers at airports and
border crossings do not need the probable cause or warrants that police
need to conduct searches. Customs agents can perform a strip search based
on "reasonable suspicion" that someone might be hiding something illegal,
the justices have held.

But Kelly, a former New York police commissioner, said: "We believe that we
can catch drug smugglers without unduly jeopardizing personal dignity and
individual rights." Under the new rules, effective Oct. 1, Customs would
have to convince a federal magistrate that it had "reasonable suspicion"
for keeping a passenger in custody beyond four hours. If the magistrate did
not go along, the passenger would be released.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the move a step in the right
direction. But it said that the reasonable-suspicion standard is relatively
easy to meet and may not be sufficient to "protect people from abusive or
discriminatory searches," according to legislative counsel Gregory Nojeim.

The ACLU said it would have preferred a tougher "probable cause" standard
that a crime had been committed.

In recent weeks, the Customs Service also has made government attorneys
available on a 24-hour basis to advise its officers before intensive
searches are conducted, and it is installing new equipment at major
airports that will help keep body searches at a minimum.

Kelly, who took office a year ago, has set up an independent review panel
to evaluate complaints of bias from searched air travelers. The
three-member panel, which includes a white, a Latina and a black, is
scheduled to report its findings and recommendations this fall.

Creation of the panel has won praise from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil
rights leader of the 1960s, who has called for an investigation of racial
profiling. Lewis, however, said recently that more needs to be done to
eliminate bias in law enforcement, which he said has caused anger across
the country.

In June, President Clinton ordered federal law enforcement officers,
including Customs agents, to document the race and gender of those they
arrest or detain, so the statistics can be used to determine if certain
groups appear to be targeted. Customs officials said they began recording
such statistics in May.

The greatest single impetus to Customs Service reform efforts was the
class-action complaint filed last year by the black women in Chicago.

One plaintiff, Gwendolyn Richards, who arrived at Chicago's O'Hare
International Airport from abroad, said that during a five-hour ordeal "I
was humiliated. I couldn't believe it was happening." Richards said she was
strip-searched, X-rayed and forced to remove her underwear for a pelvic
exam by a female agent. "They had no reason to think I had drugs." Customs
officials said that tough tactics are necessary to catch the growing number
of smugglers who swallow cocaine-filled balloons, insert packages of heroin
into body cavities or hide drugs in a hollow leg or by feigning pregnancy.

Of 2,957 pounds of heroin seized by Customs last year, 64% was found inside
the bodies or in the clothes and luggage of airline passengers.

Kelly said that an extensive new training program began earlier this year
for inspectors at airports. It involves "both what to look for but also how
to handle people -- cultural diversity training." In some cases, travelers
have been given the option of submitting to an X-ray in lieu of a body
search, officials said. The agency has requested $9 million in its next
annual budget, starting Oct. 1, for installation of onsite X-rays at major
airports, including Los Angeles International Airport.

In the past, some detainees have been taken to hospitals for X-rays if they
are suspected of swallowing sealed packages of narcotics.