TAKING STRIP SEARCHES OUT OF THE ROUTINE

Last week's Supreme Court of Canada ruling outlawing the routine
performance of strip searches by police and jail guards is welcome.

Not welcome by everyone, of course, but welcome by those who have been put
through the unpleasant ordeal for no apparent reason other than to cruelly
deprive them of their human dignity and spirit.

Strip searches -- in which people taken into custody are ordered to take
off all their clothes and be thoroughly inspected for drugs, weapons or
whatever else their jailers might choose to look for -- are sometimes
needed. Where there is reason to suppose the detainee is concealing
weapons, drugs or poisons, such careful searches are justified. They are
needed. Idiots alone would disagree that police or jail officials should
take stern pro-active measures to protect either themselves, other inmates
or even the suspects themselves.

There are other instances, however, where strip searches make no protective
sense whatever. Seven women who underwent such a search at the Wellington
Detention Centre after they picked out of a crowd of political
demonstrators in 1997, are a prominent, local case in point. They were
arrested for breaching the peace, but they were never formally charged.
There was never any reason to suspect they were armed or dangerous -- or
were anything but decent citizens caught in the act of vociferously and
legally protesting an unpopular and badly-flawed provincial government
education bill. Only because they had been delivered to the detention
centre (there was apparently no room for them at the police station) were
they strip-searched. It was prison routine. Everybody who arrived there was
given the same, shabby, punitive treatment. They were ordered to strip
naked and to be searched.

Well, it won't be such a simple, mindless matter of routine any more. Jail
staffs will have to use their brains. And that may be a problem because the
Supreme Court ruling makes it clear that they could be headed for court
themselves should their decision to perform a strip search on a objecting
individual be seriously challenged.

The inevitable result is that there'll be far fewer strip searches
performed. It may be that none will be performed unless prison officials
first establish reasonable and probable grounds to justify their action.

Supreme Court ruling or no Supreme Court ruling, however, established
punitive rituals are seldom completely killed off; they tend to
transmogrify into other, compensatory rituals. In the case of the strip
search, the likely replacement is what Waterloo Regional Police term the
'thorough search' -- a routine that differs only slightly from its
predecessor in that it requires the detainee to remove one article of
clothing at a time. The article is then checked by an officer and returned
before the next article of clothing is removed and inspected.

When applied routinely to every detainee regardless of the reasons for
their detention, it is hard to view the 'thorough search' as a more humane
or reasonable procedure than its older sister.

It is a legal dodge. Indeed, if the Supreme Court justices had been aware
of its existence, it is quite possible the two would have been banned in
the same curt judgment. Both clearly violate the right of citizens to be
(in the words of the Supreme Court) "secure from unreasonable search and
seizure".

Summary - The Supreme Court has moved to have strip searches performed only
where they are warranted.