Originally Posted by
kop84
LEO's exist for public safety. Not fixing a UA customer service issue. This is a civil matter and not a criminal matter.
UA can hide behind the contract of carriage and "not following crew member instructions" But it's flimsy at best.
What happens if the crew member decides that every needs to drop and give them 50 pushups? Can the crew order you to punch your spouse? They don't get unlimited authority just because you're sitting on an airplane. So that argument is hog-wash, it had nothing to do with the security of the flight and everything to do with fixing UA's mistake.
So if you eliminate the Flight crew's following order's authority, then there is no authority to call the police, and no lawful order that can be given to the person.
Just because someone wears a badge does not give them unlimited authority.
I think you are misunderstanding the point.
being requested by an LEO to get off of an aircraft is a lawful order. asking everyone to do 50 pushups is not.
If SOP is, request identified IDB pax to deplane verbally, and if response does not illicit wanted behaviour, and the next thing to do in said SOP is to call LEO to perform same task under trespass statutes (or some other LEGALLY identified rule), and LEO follows their own SOP, which most likely occurs in this order: verbal request, verbal assertion, verbal command, use of force, then this is a pretty standard scenario.
My reading of the situation seems to be somewhere in between, as it seems that the LEO involved in the extraction of the pax is on leave - so your particular argument about ultimate power doesnt really apply here, as they could have just pulled the pax off themselves if they felt like they had that kind of power.