West, please address my assertion that white powder or a roll of cash don't "have the appearance of being illegal" any more than a digital music player, a pet, or someone with brown skin do. In each of those cases, there may be wrongdoing, or there may be a perfectly legal explanation for the item or person. I'm very curious how you determine which things that might indicate wrongdoing are worthy of stopping from doing your job of searching for dangerous things and initiating an investigation, and which things are not.

Have you received training on estimating the total amount of cash in a roll of bills simply by looking at the roll in the process of searching for weapons, explosives, and incendiaries?


Kelly, in the comments for the "Incident at St. Louis International post, you wrote:

"If while in a bag check for our primary focus items (i.e. liquids/weapons etc) and we find things such as drugs, it IS our "procedure" to inform supervisors and Law Enforcement.

"No matter how big or small, illegal is illegal and we can't just overlook it, sorry. We can't just hand back your kilo b/c it's not a "threat"."

In response, I noted that barring the result of specialized training that I suspect you have not received, you could not in that situation identify "drugs" by sight any more than you could identify unvaccinated pets, information on digital music players that came from unauthorized copying, or people who are not in the country legally.

I asked, "In each of the above scenarios, do you feel that it is congruent with the United States Constitution to stop someone who is carrying something that might indicate wrongdoing, question that person, then "if all is kosher" let that person go on his way?" Do you?