GUWonder

You've had your face slammed to the floor so hard and in a way that it looked like that disabled teenager's face? Seeing is believing, and I've not seen it.

TSA exposing someone's breasts by accident is quite distinct from having your face smashed into the ground to have an outcome like that of this disabled, female teenage passenger. Let's just say I know which one is more likely to pay out better.

Plato90s

(shrug) Your disbelief is up to you.
That'd be a concern for the Memphis Airport police.

After all, it was their officers that arrested the teenager.

Boggie Dog

With the current climate of public opinion running against police in matters such as this any settlement would tend to favor the victim. The young lady is only asking for $100k in damages so a settlement at or near that amount would allow TSA/Police/MEM to not admit guilt nor have all of the details of this incident made public. I do not see any advantage to the defendants by letting this case go forward.

gooselee

Thanks.

I can't say I will be surprised if this is how it actually plays out, but I guess I was hoping that I was wrong. I should stop being so optimistic.

I do not believe they handled it properly, but I'm also trying to force myself to think about other possible sequences of events, since we currently lack actual evidence in this case - setting aside eyewitness statements (from the understandably biased mother) for the moment.

For example, I can see a situation where the girl was trying to get away from the police/TSA workers and back to her mother, they instinctively tried to block her, and she slipped/tripped/fell and hit her head in just the right way on the floor. Perhaps in the scramble an officer fell with her, or was trying to help her up, and that's when that photo was taken.

My own bias toward the TSA and airport security in general makes me want to believe that this was an overreaction on their part, and not as innocent of a situation as what I just described, but the point is we just don't know right now either way.

I have. In my case, there wasn't even anyone else involved.

I slipped on the tile at a hotel pool and landed just-so on the pool deck. I saw stars and had a nice cut on my forehead. Blood down the face, looked a lot worse than it actually was (hotel ended up giving us a ride to the ER, where they decided it didn't even need stitches, just a couple butterfly bandages).

I doubt that this particular case was anything like that, and I would assume that police officers are trained in how to restrain an individual with the minimal amount of harm to them. But again, nobody on this thread actually knows that yet.

GUWonder

In my post, the implication about having the face slammed involved another person or group of persons doing the slamming of the face.

While it is possible that someone may fall down or be tripped and bloody their face, I doubt that is all that took place in this MEM incident.

gooselee

I agree with you completely. My point was that it actually takes very little force to create a bloody face, if such force/impact happens to occur in just the right way.

While I do NOT think this is what happened in Memphis (same as you, I think), it is physically very possible for someone to just trip and fall on their own, with no "brutality" or "slamming" involved, and end up looking like the photo of this girl.

My point again being, that despite what I personally believe, there does not seem to be much hard evidence publicly available yet in either direction. The photo of the girl's bloodied face does not by itself constitute evidence that the force used by TSA or police caused that injury, nor does it necessarily prove what level of force was used.

nachtnebel

Because, after all, police NEVER arrest someone without reasonable cause.

As they should have in this case after doing anything resembling due diligence. They bloodied the girl and to cover their butts they arrested her. It wouldn't look too good to have a kid with a bloody face sent on her way as if nothing happened. Where have we seen this before...



I agree. The kid tripped and bloodied herself.

Yes, it was an exaggeration by way of illustration. Illustrating the ludicrous summation you provided. "Kid got in a ruckus, got arrested, end of story." You may have well have summed it up thusly. "The family's travel was delayed."

This family already carrying a really heavy burden of what, 17 years of cancer treatment for their child, travelling home after a final end to it, it should be hoped, gets suckerpunched by having their child bloodied up by people who should be PROTECTING her, and arrested to boot, at the security checkpoint because there is nobody there with even a small measure of common sense.

Plato90s

That would be an entirely separate question from whether the police considers the call to be a "non issue".Your choice of words while claiming to be stating "bare facts" is the bias that I am highlighting.

Both the claim of "brutally" and "cop beatdown" are NOT a matter of bare facts but rather deliberate exaggeration, as you now admit.

gingersnaps

The video has most likely been destroyed.

Many entities only keep video for a certain number of days.

The criminal case was dropped by the prosecutor. Unless the video is in police evidence, i doubt the airport has a copy.

Plato90s

A fair point, given it's been about a year since the original incident.

saizai

… riiiiight then.

False. Rehabilitation Act requires TSA to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled people. That depends on the disability, but it certainly includes helping blind people navigate a checkpoint.

False. Disabled people have the constitutional right to travel freely, without a caretaker. Disabled people having access to caretakers is a right, not a requirement.

The ACAA applies to airlines, not (mostly) airports, and not at all to TSA.

The ADA, and 42 USC § 1983, applies to non-feds and people acting at the direction of non-feds, like the cops.

The Rehabilitation Act, and Bivens, applies to feds and people acting at the direction of feds, like TSA, and any entity receiving federal funding, which might include the MEM PD. (I don't know.)

The FTCA & Westfall Act applies to feds' violation of torts like assault, battery, false imprisonment, false light, etc. State law applies to non-feds' violation of torts.

Again, reasonable accommodations. To the extent that a regulation fails to provide for reasonable accommodations, it is invalid. Regulations may not violate statutory or constitutional law. (E.g. Rehab Act, freedom of travel)

I do not. The caregiver is not "responsible" for the person with a disability in the sense of having any obligations to others. They're only responsible to the person with a disability. (At least unless the person with the disability is actually legally incompetent — but though the girl in this case is clearly severely disabled, there's no indication that she's unable to make decisions.)

Again, false. See above.

1. US citizens have a statutory right to travel by air.
2. Everyone has constitutional, international treaty, and human rights to enter and leave their own country.

There is no bus, train, or car route e.g. between the US and UK, nor any reasonable boat route either. Therefore, as a US citizen, I have statutory, constitutional, and international treaty rights to travel by air between the US (where I am a citizen) and UK (where I have a visa).

#2 is not applicable in this case, which was domestic travel, but I'm assuming the Cohens are US citizens, so #1 does apply.

Wrong again.

False again. Statute trumps regulation. Also, people on the no fly list are not failing to comply with a regulation; they're targeted. And the legality of the no fly list, as it applies to US citizens, is still being litigated.

(Cases mentioned thus far, IIRC, involve non-US citizens, who do not have a right to enter the US nor the statutory right to travel by air.)

No right is absolute. As a blunt example, the right to stay alive is about as basic as it gets, yet we have laws for justified homicide (eg self-defense) and capital punishment. So obviously even that right can, in some cases, be overridden by other considerations. All rights are ultimately subject to some sort of balancing test against other rights.

That's called assault and battery. They can just ask you nicely to move, or they can call the police. They cannot touch you without your consent.

You'd probably only get nominal damages for being grabbed without injury, but technically, it's still assault.

As you may be aware, I have pending litigation about this. People can ask questions (unless it's police after a Miranda type invocation, but TSA are not police). The problem is when they take some action against you, like delaying you, subjecting you to additional search, confiscating items, assaulting you, etc., if you refuse to answer.

These violate their rules.

I'm not aware of a rule this violates.

True. (Though "deem necessary" is not in fact the standard for arrest; "probable cause to believe that the arrestee has committed a crime" is the standard. If they merely think it'd be useful to arrest me, but I haven't committed a crime, too bad.)

Police are required by law to independently make an assessment. By law, and by their own arguments in court, TSA screeners have no more standing with respect to police than anyone else. (That also means, of course, that they can be prosecuted if they file a false police report. Not like that'd ever happen.)

However, if police act without that independent judgment, then the police are liable. If the police and TSA actually have some sort of agreement to tell the other what to do, then they're responsible for each others' actions to the extent it's part of that agreement.

You seem to be assuming that the arrest was lawful to begin with. Failure to cooperate with screening — even if that happened after a reasonable accommodation consideration, which I doubt — is not a crime; it's only subject to civil penalty (i.e. fines).

You're also failing to consider that police are not allowed to use excessive force. I really doubt that a bodyslam was the necessary amount of force to place a severely disabled girl under arrest.

That'd be me. There are four separate FOIAs pending:

1. TN PRA, to MEM PD
2. TN PRA, to MEM airport authority
3. FOIA, to TSA
4. FOIA, to DHS

For 1 & 2, I posted the muckrock links earlier. They're required to respond in 10 days under the TN PRA, IIRC.

For 4, I got an email from DHS today saying that they were punting it to TSA. I asked them if they had searched their own non-TSA records first, and they've not responded yet.

For 3, I got an email from TSA today saying that they don't think my request qualifies for expedited handling because they don't think "A particular urgency existed to inform the public about government activity beyond the public's right to know."

I've challenged that decision and will appeal it immediately if they decline.

Even if not expedited, they have 20 working days to respond. The chance that they will do so timely is about 0%. I've been planning to sue them again for FOIA stuff anyway, so if they don't respond properly, I'll sue them in about a month.

After that it'll probably take a year to get the records.

I don't have standing to bring a lawsuit for the TN PRA requests, since those were legally made by a person who is not me (and is a TN citizen). It is at least marginally likely that the TN agencies will respond without a lawsuit.

I do not think it is likely at all that TSA will respond without a lawsuit, but including this request in the lawsuit I was going to file anyway is trivial for me to do.

Also, I don't yet know whether they even preserved the video. If they didn't, then obviously I can't get a copy, even if they do respond.

So tl;dr: expect it to take between 10 days and 2 years.


They have hinted at this before, and their CCTV arrangements are set up to do this, but they have never asserted this in court TTBOMK, and I have won every FOIA request for TSA CCTV I have made to date, except when they spoliated the evidence, which they did for the video of my BOS incident.

If they erase it at this point, I can have them sanctioned for spoliation and referred for criminal investigation.

If they erased it before I made my requests, there's nothing I can do.

Given that the incident happened a year ago, and the standard retention period is 30 days, I expect that whether it's preserved or not was decided several months ago.

TBD. Some airports have given me this excuse (BOS); others have not (SFO, SJC).

There's also a question of whether the police will cough up the criminal records, e.g. the arrest record, witness statements, charging documents, etc. etc.

If TSA has a copy of that stuff — which I think they do, since they were involved in the attempted prosecution — then I can get them from TSA by lawsuit, but as I said, I can't sue the MEM PD for it because I don't have standing under the TN PRA.

I don't think you know what either of those words means as used in constitutional law rather than informal English.



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gooselee

Bravo, sir or ma'am. And thank you for the explanation in response to my FOIA question.

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petaluma1

^^

tanja

I think it is so scary that some people don't accept/understand disabled people. It does creep me out.
The world has to much hate.

saizai

Thank you.

Neither, please. I'm agender.

You're quite welcome.

It is often a supremely frustrating process, especially since agencies rarely if ever obey the law IME. I've tried to give you the bluntly realistic answer.

The only exceptions that come to mind are CA agencies, which are IME much more likely to interpret the CA PRA's time limits as actually mandatory rather than mere suggestions, and tiny federal agencies for simple requests, because their "FOIA department" is one person's part-time job and they get very few requests.