Pubdate: Mon, 10 Apr 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Jennifer Loven, Associated Press

REPORT POINTS TO BIAS IN CUSTOMS DRUG SEARCHES

Black Women Targets Most Often On Flights

WASHINGTON - U.S. Customs Service officials ordered black American women 
returning home from overseas to remove their clothes or undergo X-rays much 
more often than other passengers, even though their searches were less 
likely to reveal illegal hidden drugs, a report says.

Only a fraction of 1 percent of the 71.5 million passengers were singled 
out for searches as they entered the United States on international flights 
in fiscal year 1998. And the vast majority of those 52,455 passengers were 
subjected to simple pat-downs, according to the report by the General 
Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, obtained by The Associated 
Press.

The report, requested by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is to be released today.

Of those, black women were selected for more intrusive searches -- strip 
searches or X-rays -- more than any other group. White men and women alike 
also had a high likelihood of being strip-searched, and black men were 
chosen more often than most other passengers to be X-rayed.

Black women were much less likely than the others to be found with illegal 
drugs, the report said.

"Although searched passengers with certain characteristics were subject to 
more intrusive searches, they were not always more likely to be found 
carrying contraband," the GAO said.

As allegations of abusive searches surfaced over the past two years, the 
Customs Service has made repeated efforts to change how passengers are 
checked for drugs. The agency faces numerous lawsuits alleging people were 
singled out for body searches because of their race or sex, including an 
move by almost 100 black women to file a class-action suit in Chicago.

Customs officials said changes, most enacted after the period studied by 
the GAO, already are yielding results not reflected in the report. For 
instance, fewer intrusive searches are being conducted, but more are 
resulting in drug seizures.

"We don't necessarily disagree with the report," Customs Commissioner 
Raymond Kelly said in an interview. "The intimation is a bit outdated. I 
think we've taken the problem head-on."

For instance, X-rays conducted in 1998 found drugs almost twice as often on 
white men and women and black men as on black women. And strip searches 
that year uncovered drugs on Hispanics and black men at much higher rates 
than on black women.

Also, black women who were U.S. citizens were nine times as likely as white 
American women to be X-rayed but less than half as likely to be concealing 
illegal drugs.

Such searches are intended to catch smugglers who swallow drug packets or 
hide cocaine or heroin inside clothing or in body cavities. The searches 
usually begin with a pat-down and, with reasonable suspicion, can proceed 
to a strip search, an X-ray, monitored bowel movement or a body cavity search.
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