Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The president outlined the policy in his weekly radio address, including it in a pitch for the pending anticrime bill. He contrasted constitutional fears about unlawful searches with the needs of public housing residents suffering "bloodshed and terror."
"The crime bill will help us take back those rights for all of our people," Clinton said. "So will our new policy to protect public housing residents."
The policy grew out of a conflict last August between the Chicago Housing Authority and the American Civil Liberties Union over a Housing Authority-sponsored warrantless "sweep" of a housing project by police searching for guns.
On April 7, a federal judge reaffirmed a ban on sweeps, siding with the ACLU in ruling they violated Fourth Amendment rights prohibiting unlawful search and seizure.
Clinton then ordered Attorney General Janet Reno and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros to devise a way to protect public housing residents without trampling the Constitution.
The result was the new policy, which Cisneros described at a White House news conference. Cisneros said $28.8 million in new or reprogrammed funds will be designated for security and crime prevention in Chicago's 135,000 public housing units. He also made clear that the new sweeps plan - the core of the policy - was designed not only for Chicago, but "so that other housing authorities across the country would be able to act upon it." The plan was devised to "look at the nature of the sweeps that might be necessary, and [execute them] within constitutional limits."
The policy envisions controlling lobbies of buildings in housing projects, frisking suspicious people, searching common areas and vacant apartments, obtaining warrants to search apartments for probable cause and conducting warrantless searches in emergency circumstances.
It also describes how housing authorities might use "consent clauses," in which tenants agree in their leases to let police conduct unannounced searches. Cisneros said similar clauses allow maintenance workers to enter apartments in case of fire or other emergencies.
No one was immediately available for comment at the ACLU. In Chicago, the Illinois state ACLU legal director, Harvey Grossman, told the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday that written lease agreements "would be acceptable" as long as they are not "a condition of the lease" and could be revoked "whenever a tenant wants to."
by CNB