POLICE MAY HAVE UNDERSTATED STREET SEARCHES, SPITZER SAYS

An elite police unit that includes the four officers who shot Amadou
Diallo may have vastly underreported the number of people it has
stopped and searched on the streets in the last two years,
State Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer said in a radio interview
broadcast Monday.

Spitzer, whose office is investigating whether the stop-and-frisk
practices of the Street Crime Unit have violated the civil rights of
minority residents, said the unit may have searched hundreds of
thousands of people in the last two years without finding any basis
for arresting them.

The Police Department says that the unit searched 45,000 people in
1997 and 1998, as measured by the paperwork filed by the officers, and
made 9,500 arrests.

A police spokeswoman said Monday that the unit has properly complied
with the policy to report all searches.

In the weeks since Diallo was shot, critics of the Police Department
have repeatedly cited statistics showing that the unit arrests only
about one-fifth of the people it stops and frisks. Critics say this
ratio is evidence that many of the searches are baseless.

Spitzer said in the radio interview that officers have told him that
when they frisk people and find nothing, they usually do not file the
paperwork, a form called a UF250, that is required by department policy.

In the interview with Brian Lehrer on WNYC, which was taped on Friday
and broadcast yesterday, Spitzer said: "I've spoken to many officers
who say that they do not fill out the forms, the 250, for every
stop-and-frisk, and they may fill out, at most, 1 in 5, or 1 in 10. In
which case we may have had several hundred thousand stops-and-frisks,
with only the five to ten thousand arrests, in which case the ratio
would become that much more overwhelming, and suggestive of something
that we need to think about very carefully." He acknowledged that his
evidence was anecdotal.

Responding to Spitzer's comments, Marilyn Mode, the Police
Department's deputy commissioner for public information, said
yesterday, "I think he's wrong." She added, "Police officers are
supposed to fill these forms out, and we have every reason to believe
they do."

The Attorney General's office is looking into accusations that, in
violation of the law, the Street Crime Unit searches mostly young
black and Hispanic men based mostly on race and ethnicity, with little
or no reason to suspect that they have committed crimes. In the
interview with Lehrer, Spitzer called the matter of police searches
"the most serious civil rights issue, in my view, facing the city."

The unit's frisking practices are also being investigated by the
United States Attorney in Manhattan, Mary Jo White.

Police officials and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani have vigorously denied
that the searches are without merit or are based on race.

The unit, which numbers 380 officers out of a 39,000-officer force,
accounts for 40 percent of the illegal guns seized by the police.

Four members of the Street Crime Unit, in search of a serial rapist,
fired 41 shots at Diallo, 22, a unarmed street peddler from Guinea, as
he stood in the vestibule of his apartment house in the Bronx last
month. Diallo was hit 19 times and killed.

The shooting has become the most sensitive political issue in the
city, with protesters arrested daily in front of Police Headquarters,
and Giuliani regularly deriding them and the press, while defending
the police against a barrage of criticism.

Spitzer's office reflected some of that sensitivity yesterday,
refusing to elaborate on his remarks, or even to repeat them. His
press secretary, Darren Dopp, said the office could not discuss an
investigation in progress, though Spitzer appeared to have done just
that. Dopp said Spitzer was unavailable for comment.