Two women, 65 and 75 years old, were taken to a police station in Mount Vernon, N.Y., after a traffic stop in 2020. Officers instructed both women to undress. Then they were told to bend over and cough.
Neither woman was arrested, and an investigation determined there had been no basis for the traffic stop in the first place. One of the women said she had been left “very humiliated” and “on the verge of fainting” from fear after the invasive search, commonly used in drug arrests.
The encounter is just one example of a long-running pattern of improper strip searches conducted by the police department in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.
In the 34-page report, investigators outlined “significant systemic deficiencies” at the very core of the police department that they said had resulted in unnecessarily violent encounters and improper arrests. The report also raised “serious concerns about discriminatory policing in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
According to the report, “highly intrusive” strip searches and cavity searches were “deeply ingrained” standard practices in the department. Investigators said that the department had acknowledged that officers performed strip searches on everyone they arrested until at least October 2022, a practice that the report said amounted to a “gross violation of the Fourth Amendment on an enormous scale.”
Sometimes, these searches occurred before people were even arrested and were performed even when an officer had no reason to believe the person had drugs or other contraband, according to the report. Several people told investigators that officers had searched them repeatedly even when they had been in custody and under police observation “at all times” between the searches.
