A new security management team instituted a more aggressive loss prevention strategy. Security personnel said they were encouraged to "take chances" in stopping suspicious customers, even if it meant intercepting innocent people. Bad grabs, they said they were told, were part of the business.
The number of contacts with the Police Department, made when security workers suspected a person had been shoplifting or engaging in credit card fraud, soon jumped drastically.
But along with the increase in cases, complaints began to surface from black shoppers who said they were victims of racial profiling in the store, on Madison Avenue. At least one shopper has filed a lawsuit against Barneys, and another plans to.
The lawsuits, which came to light last week and landed on the front page of The Daily News, attracted national attention for their allegations of race- and class-based discrimination. The suits raised criticism not only of Barneys, but of celebrity figures, like Jay-Z, who has a partnership with the store. They have also led to an inquiry by the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and on Tuesday there was an unlikely meeting of the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Barneys chief executive, Mark Lee.
Across town, at the flagship Macy's store at Herald Square, at least two black shoppers, one of them the actor Robert Brown, of the HBO series "Treme," have said they were similarly stopped this year by the police after, they said, store security workers deemed their purchases suspicious. Mr. Schneiderman's inquiry also includes Macy's.
None of those who have come forward to say they were detained by the police were charged with any crime.
The accusations were particularly troublesome for Macy's, which, in 2005, reached an agreement with the state attorney general's office to amend its security practices after investigators found black and Hispanic shoppers were disproportionately stopped on suspicion of shoplifting. That agreement ended in 2008. This year, said an official familiar with the current investigation who was not permitted to comment publicly on its details, the state attorney general has received close to a dozen complaints from shoppers who said they had been profiled by security officers at Macy's.
In the case of Barneys, the official said, the state attorney general is investigating allegations of similar treatment in cases besides the two shoppers pursuing litigation.
"It has come to our office's attention that there are problems with what is now called 'shop and frisk' with some major stores in New York," Mr. Schneiderman said at a news conference in Buffalo on Tuesday.
Mr. Schneiderman said the investigation would look at the policies in the stores as well as the relationship between store security officers and the New York Police Department. Both Macy's and Barneys have denied involvement in the episodes of detention of shoppers that have come to light.
"In both of these instances, no one from Barneys New York raised any issue with these purchases," Mr. Lee said on Tuesday, after emerging from his meeting with Mr. Sharpton in Harlem. "No one from Barneys brought them to the attention of our internal security, and no one from Barneys reached out to external authorities."
The Police Department disputed that account. In both cases, "N.Y.P.D. officers were conducting unrelated investigations and took action based on information brought to their attention by Barneys employees while in the security room," said John J. McCarthy, the department's chief spokesman.
At the center of the dispute at Barneys are two young black shoppers: Trayon Christian, 19, who has filed suit against the store and the city in State Supreme Court; and Kayla Phillips, 21, who filed a notice of intent to sue.
In his suit, Mr. Christian said the trouble occurred on April 29 after he bought a Salvatore Ferragamo belt with his Chase debit card. Several blocks away on Fifth Avenue, he said, he was stopped by plainclothes police officers.
The officers questioned his ability to pay for the belt, valued at about $350, and said the debit card must have been a fake, according to the suit. Mr. Christian was handcuffed and taken to the 19th Precinct station house where he was held, according to the suit, for about two hours before being freed.
Ms. Phillips described being "stopped, frisked, searched and detained" by the police at the store after a purchase at Barneys of a handbag valued at over $2,000.
Both stops, as well as two more related to shoppers at Macy's, were being investigated by the Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau, Mr. McCarthy said.
The security changes Barneys put into effect were detailed by Raymel Cardona, a former assistant manager for loss prevention at the store, and a former plainclothes security guard, Aaron Argueta, 36. Both men were fired from Barneys, and intend to challenge their dismissals with federal employment authorities, said their lawyer, J. Patrick DeLince.
Aspects of their accounts were supported by Nafeesa Baptiste, a former sales associate of five years, who said she had increasingly found herself and her black customers — some of them well-known musicians and actors — followed by plainclothes security guards "from floor to floor."
She added that security agents frequently sought copies of receipts, in one case after a substantial cash transaction. "Because I had mostly men of color, it happened often to me," said Ms. Baptiste, 35.
She quit Barneys last month and has reported workplace harassment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Representatives of Barneys strongly disputed the accounts of the former workers. Charlotte Blechman, the executive vice president for communications, described the two men as "disgruntled former employees," and singled out Mr. Argueta for installing a "bed and workout barbell in a company closet and sleeping on the job in the store multiple times." Mr. Cardona, his supervisor, was also "fired for cause," she said.
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