Quote:A former TSA agent in Ft. Myers, Fla., who received a pat down she found intrusive is heading to court in early July to protest misdemeanor battery charges after she demonstrated on a security supervisor to complain about the way she was touched.

Carol Price, of Bonita Springs, Fla., was traveling on United Airlines from Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers to Cleveland, Ohio on April 20, en route to her brother's funeral in Cincinnati.

When she went through security, Price received a pat down that she felt involved "intrusive touching of her genitals and breasts," said her lawyer, John Mills.

According to Mills, Price went over to Kristen Arnberg, her former supervisor, to complain about the pat down. When Arnberg asked what she meant by intrusive, Price demonstrated on her, said Mills.

"She used to be a TSA employee up until 2007, she obviously knows the procedure," said Mills.

According to the police report, Price "did intentionally and without consent grab the victim and slide her hands into the crotch area" of Arnberg.

Do as I say, not as I molest.

You used to want to emulate public workers tasked with "keeping us safe." Now, you get arrested for doing so.

Should be interesting to see how this one turns out. Of course they will say that passengers consent to the pat down, but do you really have a choice?

(06-19-2012 10:24 PM)ETSUfan1 Wrote:  Should be interesting to see how this one turns out. Of course they will say that passengers consent to the pat down, but do you really have a choice?

TSA's right to screen passengers is not on trial here, but of course passengers give consent to be patted down. If you are selected for a pat-down, you asked to spread your arms, etc. If you calmly tell them that you refuse a pat down, I am nearly certain that TSA will not pat you down. Instead, they will call over the police, who will investigate to determine whether you committed the crime of attempting to bring a weapon into the sterile area. If you only get patted down over the course of this investigation, consider yourself lucky, but police are allowed to use force in the execution of their duties, including forcible pat-downs. If you do it right, as opposed to screaming like a lunatic and stopping up the flow of passengers like most people that refuse a pat-down would, I'm not sure if it is technically a crime to withhold consent to TSA. It is a crime to interfere with their job, but I think it would be hard to argue that necessarily means that you have to give consent to everything that they do, as long as you don't resist arrest or physically stop them from doing something to you.

So you kind-of have a choice: 1) get pat-down by someone that has performed thousands of them and is pretty much numb to the procedure by his/her first coffee break, or 2) get pat-down or worse by a cop that is more used to patting down gang members and those flaking out on drugs and thinks that you are behaving really, really suspiciously in an environment where suspicious people are sometimes suicide bombers. Oh, and might still think you are a terrorist even after the pat-down and could hold you for 24 hours while your background is investigated. Not a nice choice, but I'm not so sure that choosing option 2 is technically illegal.