Originally Posted by SirFlysALot
Well it is a BFD....I actually had to prove the profiling to him which he just could not believe. I told him "Watch this" After clearing the metal detector I reached for his bag. TSA politely asked if the could look through the bag. They said it was entirely random of course. I said sure and as the TSA employee walked off with the bag. I grabbed my bag and tried to walk past. I mentioned that it wasn't my bag anyway.
They threw it back and ripped my bag out of my hand. So much for random.
At MSP all non-blonds seem to get secondary screening.
Has any Indian, American Indian, Mediterainian, Mexican or Jewish person etc. caused a hijacking or terror incident in the US? I think not.
But Timothy McVeigh did. He was a clean cut blond person. So even tho clean cut blond persons have a history of violence they are not profiled.
All TSA has to do is make sure no weapons get past. There should be the same scrutiny for ALL passengers. Period.
The Lockerbie incident was caused by a woman who unknown to her brought the bomb on board. Hence the "Are you carrying any thing given to you be persons unknown to you?" silly question. Unfortunately she knew the guy as it was her finance. I do not see any profile for a blond woman with low self esteem. [rant off/]
I do not doubt what happened to you; but I am greatly disturbed by what you said. First of all, there's not supposed to be any profiling whatsoever when it comes to random screening. It is supposed to be the next person according to gender. In other words, if I finished hand-wanding a male passenger, then I get the next male passenger who comes in through the WTMD for random hand-wanding (the simple truth is that we don't do random hand-wanding; there's plenty of other things to do with selectee screening, bag checks and other regular screening.) The point is that we don't pick and choose. If you truly believe this is happening to you, I strongly encourage you to complain in writing to your Congressperson, TSA, your airline and ORD. This gives all of us a black eye, and it should not be tolerated. I hope you were being serious, because I am absolutely serious with my recommendation to you.
The other thing that disturbed me was that a screener grabbed your bag out of your hand. That, my friend, is simple assault, and you should not hesitate to bring up a formal criminal complaint against the screener who did this. TSA procedures specifically prohibit grabbing items out of passengers' hands. First of all, the screener failed to have positive control of the item if he/she allowed you to get it
after a security concern was identified. This is already a major violation, so that screener should already be reprimanded for incompetence. But, by forcefully taking an item from you, that screener has already gone past the point-of-no-return and should be terminated. There is absolutely no excuse for that behavior.
Again, I hope you were being absolutely accurate in your account of what happened. I don't want people like that representing me or my agency, so I encourage you to take action.