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New York stakes
The GOP is putting out a line that Hillary Clinton's entry into the Senate race would hurt Al Gore's presidential bid, but the opposite is true.
By Joe Conason
[06/01/99]

As the world yawns
The Clinton spin machine kicks into overdrive to protect the president against the damaging allegations in the Cox Report.
By Jake Tapper
[05/28/99]

Let the litigation begin
Kevorkian's lawyer's suit against the Columbine killers' parents is just the beginning.
By Dave Cullen
[05/28/99]

Traitor in chief
Clinton has not only dismantled our national defense, he has given away our military advantages to enemies all too willing to destroy us.
By David Horowitz
[05/28/99]

Will Milosevic's indictment matter?
They're not dancing in the streets of Sarajevo yet, because the indicted Serbian war criminal may never be brought to justice.
By Laura Rozen
[05/27/99]

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What happened to Morales was not an isolated incident. Today he is a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of at least 63,000 people who were illegally strip-searched while awaiting arraignment on misdemeanor charges in Queens and Manhattan. In 1986, a federal appeals court had declared it unconstitutional to strip-search misdemeanor suspects without probable cause. But for more than 10 months in 1996 and 1997, corrections officers searched every single prisoner -- a number that could reach 115,000 according to plaintiffs' lawyers -- who passed through Central Booking in Queens and Manhattan. The searches did not stop until the class-action suit was filed in late May 1997.

The city does not deny that unconstitutional strip-searches occurred. But Lorna Goodman, one of the city's top staff lawyers and a spokeswoman for the Corporation Counsel, said the practice was an administrative mistake that didn't hurt most prisoners. "To the 90th percentile, the persons who were strip-searched had been in the system before. They had been through it all. If a striptease person is strip-searched, the injury is less than the injury to a 17-year-old parochial school girl who's never been arrested."

The strip-searches, Goodman explains, resulted from what she calls an "administrative shift." In order to make more police officers available for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's celebrated war on crime, the NYPD turned over control of the pre-arraignment holding pens in Queens and Manhattan to the Department of Corrections. The police officers who had worked there were reassigned to crime-fighting duties. When the jailers took over, they brought along their policy of strip-searching everyone who comes into corrections custody. "You can say that this was based on negligence or poor management or sloppy supervision," Goodman acknowledged. "But it was a mistake, not a policy decision."

Goodman's legalistic notion of policy is as counterintuitive as the definitions of sexual contact offered by lawyers in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Departmental memos approved by the senior wardens for Manhattan and Queens ordered strip-searches for every prisoner awaiting arraignment. The memos included specific instructions outlining which corrections personnel were responsible for strip-searches on the various shifts. The procedures outlined in the memos, which are included in court papers, took effect on July 27, 1996, the day the Corrections Department took over from the NYPD. But Goodman said those memos do not technically constitute city policy statements.

While the distinction may prove important in a court of law, the court of public opinion is sure to be less forgiving. After a series of high-profile police brutality cases, the class-action suit will further tarnish Giuliani's once glittering law-enforcement practices. The mayor declined to be interviewed for this article.

In 1996 and early 1997, fawning foreign reporters and delegations from police departments around the world queued up to visit the NYPD's "CompStat" meetings, where department chiefs grill precinct commanders on their crime-fighting performance. As part of New York's "quality-of-life" policing strategy, the NYPD dramatically increased misdemeanor arrests during this period, which enabled the police to pick up criminals wanted on outstanding warrants and to establish order in high-crime neighborhoods. Ironically, many of the misdemeanor suspects arrested in Queens and Manhattan during this period could end up claiming damages from the city.

Giuliani's hard-nosed anti-crime policies were the locomotive driving the mayor's high approval ratings through his first five years in office, when the murder rate was slashed by more than 50 percent. Now, those achievements have been diminished by numerous high-profile allegations of police misconduct, and the mayor's approval ratings have taken a beating.

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