CIVILIAN COMPLAINT REVIEW BOARD CITES IMPROPER POLICE STRIP SEARCHES

The independent city agency that investigates accusations of police
abuse said yesterday that it had found evidence suggesting that
officers may frequently be conducting inappropriate strip searches. It
also said that officers and their supervisors are often unaware of
Police Department procedures governing such searches.

The agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, based its concerns on
dozens of complaints of improper strip searches filed since 2002, and
reviewed in detail more than a dozen, mostly by narcotics officers,
that it had found to be improper. The board detailed 10 substantiated
complaints from four boroughs as part of a recommendation that the
department increase training on when strip searches may be conducted.

All but one of the cases detailed in the recommendation involved
people who had been arrested for petty crimes, including making too
much noise, disorderly conduct and drug possession. In most instances,
they told board investigators that they had been ordered to strip to
their underwear or strip completely. Some said they had been ordered
to squat or bend over. And in all of the cases, the officers or
supervisors who ordered or performed the searches told the review
board investigators that they believed the searches had been
appropriate, and in most cases routine. The board did not release the
names of the complainants because such files are confidential under
law.

The agency said it was concerned because even though the overall
number of accusations of improper strip searches is relatively small -
65 last year and 32 so far this year - in most cases, officers and
often supervisors told board investigators that others in their
commands routinely conducted the kind of searches that the board found
violate the police Patrol Guide, a compendium of department
procedures. Sixteen of 85 strip-search complaints, made between Jan.
1, 2002, and April 1, 2004, have been substantiated.

The board said it undertook the study because it determined in January
that strip search complaints were substantiated roughly twice as often
as other complaints it investigates. They include the use of excessive
force and offensive language, discourtesy and other types of abuse of
authority.

The training recommendation, announced at yesterday's board meeting by
the chairman, Hector Gonzalez, was contained in a letter from the
executive director, Florence L. Finkle, to Police Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly. It included a summary of the 10 cases that the board
detailed. Disciplinary action was taken in one of the 10 cases, even
though three others are more than a year old.

The department's chief spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne,
acknowledged that the review highlighted training shortfalls,
"including familiarity with the Patrol Guide and the ability to
properly articulate the reasons for a search." The department is
developing a new training video, he said, "that reinforces instruction
on when such searches are permissible and when they are not." He said
the officers in the cases reviewed were not abusive and did not
intentionally violate department procedures.

The board's review was not the first time that the department's
strip-search practices have come under scrutiny. A federal lawsuit
filed in 2001 contends that officers in Brooklyn central booking
routinely violated people's rights by strip-searching people arrested
on misdemeanor charges and lesser offenses in front of crowds of
prisoners. The lawsuit depicts a parade of ordinary New Yorkers caught
up in morass of degradation after being arrested for petty crimes.
Late last year, a judge ruled that the lawsuit could continue not only
on behalf of the people who filed it, but also on behalf of all others
with similar complaints.

The review board's training recommendation does not find fault with
the manner in which the searches were conducted, but with the fact
that they were conducted at all. The Patrol Guide, following state and
federal law, requires that to conduct a strip search, an officer must
have reasonable suspicion that the person under arrest is concealing
weapons, contraband or evidence that might not be discovered by
frisking him, or through the more thorough search that is routinely
conducted when an arrested person is brought into a police building.

The recommendation said the officers' failure to follow Patrol Guide
procedures might result in the violation of constitutional rights, the
suppression of evidence in criminal cases and civil liability.

"They didn't hide what they did when they were interviewed at the
C.C.R.B.," said one board official involved in the inquiry. "They
believed that what they were doing was consistent with department
policies, and their own statements and actions reflected a profound
misunderstanding of the department's policies."

The searches involved officers assigned to narcotics units in northern
and southern Queens, northern Brooklyn, East Harlem and the Bronx, the
13th Precinct in Manhattan and a housing gang unit in the Bronx.

Ms. Finkle, the board's executive director, said the training
recommendation underscored her agency's ability to uncover and collect
information on department practices during its investigations into
complaints of police abuse - even cases that are not substantiated -
and synthesize them into valuable policy guidance for the department.
"These types of recommendations," she said, "can have a lasting impact
on police policies."

But several civil liberties lawyers who have handled strip-search
cases said the review board's findings were evidence of a much more
widespread problem. Richard J. Cardinale, one of the lawyers who
brought the 2001 lawsuit, said abusive searches were common in
narcotics commands, where groups of suspects are often processed
together. "They just line them up in a cell and say, 'Get naked and
squat,' " he said.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, said his group's investigation into complaints of
strip searches suggest that the cases cited by the review board
represent "examples of a much larger problem."