[via FindLaw's Writ - Sebok: New York City's $50 Million Strip-search Suit Settlement]:

Tyson was filed on behalf of approximately 60,000 persons who were arrested on misdemeanors between July 1996 and June 1997 in Manhattan and Queens. During this period, the New York City Department of Corrections, which ran the city's jails (where people who are arrested and awaiting arraignment are held) stripped and examined everyone brought to them, regardless of whether that person appeared to be concealing contraband or not.

I want to point out the cases of strip searches covered by this settlement where done under the Rudolph Giuliani administration. Rudoplh Giuliani's hyper-inflating of the term "crime activity" in the city of New York --via his 'quality of life' policies-- is what led to more than 60,000 people being arrested and mistreated by NYPD and corrections personnel.

Unfortunately for the City, ten years earlier, in 1986, the Supreme Court had held in Weber v. Dell that strip-searching a person who has been arrested for a minor offense, but who has not yet been arraigned or convicted of a crime, violates the Fourth Amendment. The lawyers working for the City of New York knew or should have known of that holding. Unsurprisingly, soon after Tyson was filed in 1997, the city ordered the Department of Correction to stop its policies of automatic strip searches. The lead plaintiff in Tyson, a secretary in the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn, argued that she and everyone who was subjected to automatic strip searches were denied their Fourth Amendment rights and sued under a federal statute, 42 U.S.C � 1983, which allows citizens to receive monetary damages for violations of federal constitutional rights. Her claim, in effect, was that New York City had committed a massive constitutional tort.

Let me hammer this one home : This abuse of power, a not so distant echoes of the recent cases of torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, was perpetrated here in the city of New York thanks to the enforcement and administrative policies of a Republican mayor. Which is why there was nary a peep politically when the blanket swoops of protesters and by-standers happened during the Republican National Convention and called for, but of course, another Republican mayor. NYC "quality of life" under Giuliani. RNC "mob control" under Bloomberg. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo "interrogation tactics" and "terrorism control" under George Bush. Violence seems to be the political appetizer du jour for Republicans like Bush, Giuliani and Bloomberg.