Originally Posted by
Bart
Now I can't speak for all the airports on God's Green Earth; however, there is a chain of command. My point was that a TSO has to report directly to his/her supervisor, and that supervisor then determines whether or not there is enough information to either make a screening decision or if it's something that falls outside the scope of TSA but needs to be reported to another agency. It's not the Wild West with TSOs having this mystical authority to have citizens arrested on a whim.
You make it sound like there's some careful deliberative process going on here. But that's not possible. Since neither the TSO nor the supervisor can detain the passenger nor sieze any item, if the decision isn't made within a few seconds, the passenger (and likely the item in question too) will be long gone before the LEO arrives. Given that time constraint, how can the supervisor do anything other than always support the TSO?