A suburban New York police department had a practice of routinely violating residents’ civil rights, including making illegal arrests and using unnecessary strip and cavity searches, according to a new US justice department report.
The report on a pattern and practice of police misconduct at the department in Mount Vernon, just north of New York City, is one of 12 investigations opened by the Department of Justice into local policing agencies since 2021, including those sparked by the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.
No single incident prompted the investigation into Mount Vernon’s approximately 160-officer force. But the illegal strip-search in 2020 of two women, one age 65 and the other 75, were emblematic of the department’s shortcomings, said the report, which was released at the end of last week.
Arrested on suspicion of buying drugs, officers searched the women’s car, found nothing, and hauled them into a police station in handcuffs, the report said. Supervisors there approved a fully nude strip-search by detectives who “told them to bend over and cough”.
After an internal investigation found that the officers had lied about the pair buying drugs, those involved were docked a few vacation days, the report said.
The police union representing officers in the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Until at least the fall of 2022, it was the Mount Vernon force’s practice to strip-search every person it arrested, according to the report. Officers also strip-searched people they did not arrest, detained and interrogated people without formally arresting them, and arrested people for verbally criticizing police officers.
Illegal strip and cavity searches continued into at least 2023, the report found. The investigators said that while the practice was “curtailed” during its investigation, “we are not confident that these practices have ended”.
Among a catalog of unconstitutional arrests, the justice department identified a case where officers took the mother of a shooting victim to a police station and interrogated her, even as her dying daughter was rushed to the hospital. The daughter, struck by a stray bullet, died while her mother was in custody. Officers did not articulate probable cause for her detention.
Officers also arrested people for cursing at police, violating their right to free speech, the justice department said.
The department also suffered from financial mismanagement, which exacerbated pervasive human rights violations rooted in illegal policies and lack of training, the report said. It noted that low salaries make it hard to attract and retain quality officers, train staff and pay its bills, starving its supply budget.
The report noted that the city is already taking steps to improve its policing. It offered a series of recommendations, including implementing measures “to ensure that unconstitutional strip and body cavity searches do not take place”.
In a statement, Shawyn Patterson-Howard, Mount Vernon’s mayor, said the city would work with the justice department to address its findings.
“We wholeheartedly support our good officers and at the same time will not tolerate and will punish unconstitutional policing,” said Patterson-Howard, a Democrat.
The statement noted that three police officers and two civilian employees had been fired after an investigation in 2021. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond to questions about when and why those people were fired.
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