Pubdate: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 Source: Guelph Mercury (CN ON) Copyright: 2001 Guelph Mercury Newspapers Limited Contact: http://www.guelphmercury.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1418 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart