Originally Posted by
Section 107
On their face, no, of course not, they were absurd incidents.
Having said that, I also wasn't there and don't know any of the details other than what has been presented here, so it's possible there were other factors involved which would make the decisions reasonable.
But as much as it pains me to appear to defend the Dept of Homeland Insecurity - lets keep things in perspective. There are ~50k TSOs handling more than 450,000,000 checkpoint transactions every year. With that kind of volume of human interactions there are bound to be ridiculous and egregious incidents. Even if there were 300 such absurd incidents over the last 10 years, that would be 300 out of 4,500,000,000 interactions; lamentable to some degree to be sure - but hardly a deplorable state of affairs.
There was one case on the whole planet of a failed shoe bomber yet TSA forces most travelers to remove their shoes so they can be x-rayed. Is that keeping things in perspective?
The size of the workforce isn't the problem. McDonald's, Burger King, and other such entities can produce a product across all of their stores so people know exactly what they are going to get. They do it by training their new employees to do things the way the company wants them to be done. I think we can all agree that these employees are in many cases not high achievers yet they either do it the company way or move on. I recognize that screening people and things is different than making food but the training principals remain the same. There is no excuse to not do the job properly and if the employee cannot do the job they need to move on also.
When travelers have no effective means to challenge a TSA decision at the checkpoint then the situation is indeed deplorable. It would be deplorable even if it was just one incident. TSA should be require to provide a means for a passenger to challenge a checkpoint decision to an office outside of the airport so the situation can have an unbiased view and an immediate decision. That would resolve the "Screener Discretion" problem. We know that checkpoint TSA supervisors ,on up to the FSD, back up their employees in most cases. Failing that their should be a method for the traveler to recover their property, including having TSA ship the item to them at the travelers cost.
How deplorable is it that a Flyer Talk member had their life saving Nitroglycerin Pills confiscated and was threatened with never being able to fly if they ever tried bringing the pills again? That isn't just a horrible decision by one person but was backed up through the chain of command at that airport. There has to be recourse but then TSA would think that weakens screener authority, or as I would term it, screening bullying.
When a system is broken it either needs to be repaired or replaced. Personally I don't think TSA is repairable.