San Francisco Sheriff Vicki Hennessy wants to scale back the use of strip searches at the county’s jails, particularly for transgender suspects. One way to do that: install electronic body scanners, similar to the ones at airport security checkpoints.

It’s a solution city officials said would improve both inmate and officer safety because the search procedure is less invasive. It also comes amid a broader effort by the city to improve conditions for transgender inmates. Mayor Ed Lee has included $300,000 in the city’s new budget to buy two scanners.

“I think the importance of this is that we’re now, finally, addressing the dignity and the respect that we should have been showing transgender people forever,” said Theresa Sparks, Lee’s senior adviser on transgender initiatives and a former president of the city’s Police Commission.

Deputies have been following a directive Hennessy issued in June 2016 instructing them to honor requests, if possible, for searches to be performed by a person matching the suspect’s gender identity. A transgender woman, for example, may request a search by a female officer.

“We have a very small transgender population (in jail) — I think we have four or five right now at any one time,” Hennessy said. “However, we still want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to ensure that they feel safe and that they are respected in their sexual identity. That’s always been a goal.”

Hennessy stressed that while the scanner proposal came together with transgender people in mind, cutting down on strip searches would be a positive step for both inmates and officers. “Frankly, nobody who comes in wants to be strip-searched, and nobody who has to do a strip search likes to do a strip search,” she said.

Hennessy said one scanner would “certainly” be placed at the county’s central intake and release facility on Seventh Street in San Francisco. The location of the second scanner has not been decided. The Board of Supervisors will finalize the city’s $10.1 billion budget later this month, and it could take another six months to a year before the scanners are installed.

Currently, protocol dictates that any suspect bound for at least an overnight stay in one of San Francisco’s jails must be strip-searched for drugs, weapons or other contraband not permitted behind bars.

With the scanners, “instead of getting strip-searched, they would walk through the body scanner and we would be able to see if they’re hiding any drugs or weapons at that point,” Hennessy said. A strip search would still be triggered if the scanner indicated that an inmate was possibly concealing contraband, however.

Some transgender advocacy organizations, however, remain skeptical that body scanners represent the best step toward improving conditions for transgender inmates.

“When we heard about the body scanners, we told the mayor’s office that it was not a good idea,” said Flor Bermudez, the managing attorney and director of the Detention Project at the Transgender Law Center in Oakland. Bermudez said the money San Francisco intends to use for the scanners would be better spent “training new guards and making sure the searches are being conducted by the people whom transgender people feel safest with.”

Bermudez is also concerned that scanner searches could actually be more invasive because many require operators to select whether the machine is inspecting a male or a female, and scans are based in part on a person’s mass, weight and other physical attributes.

“Unless (the scanner) is ungendered in every kind of way, it will, in fact, put transgender people at more risk of harassment and singling out,” Bermudez said.

According to federal policy, airport Transportation Safety Adminstration officers scan travelers based on a each person’s expressed gender identity. Hennessy said she was researching gender-neutral scanners into her decision-making as she conducts research on what type of device to purchase.

The Transgender Law Center and the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco have also been working with the city for two years to craft a policy allowing transgender suspects to state their gender identity, and then be searched, booked and housed accordingly.

But critics contend that the Sheriff’s Department has not moved fast enough when it comes to housing transgender inmates where they feel the safest, which could mean according to their gender identity.

“I just wonder why our policy hasn’t been engaged with at all, or why we seem to be at an impasse,” said Woods Ervin, policy director at TGI Justice. “Why was this (scanner proposal) not brought to us beforehand so we could talk about our concerns?”

Transgender inmates are now housed with those of the same gender identity, away from the general jail population.

“Our biggest issue is making sure people are safe and putting them in places where they will remain safe,” Hennessy said. “And sometimes people may want something that we in our estimation is not safe, and we have to sometimes overrule. We’re still making progress, and we have a ways to go.”

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa