Section 107

Right, because no non-black person is ever subjected to additional scrutiny when detected bringing dense obscuring objects through a checkpoint.

Section 107

Spend some time using one of these machines and you will learn how ambiguous many items look on the monitor.

Seriously, next time you go to your local courthouse, ask to do a "ride-along" and fi they will let you watch the deputies/bailiffs/security as they run the scanners. Then, see if you can tell that a dense object is benign simply because of the person who brought it is identified with one or another group.

Larry Craig and Anthony Weiner are (were) part of a VERY elite group that should by all accounts be considered beyond reproach as a security threat - would you want to touch their laptops....?

petaluma1

I'm not saying that books don't look ambiguous on a monitor. I am saying that leafing through a book after identifying it is a waste. If there's an explosive in there, the screener won't ever know 'cause he won't be around.

jkhuggins

And how do you "identify it" as a book without leafing through it?

chollie

Are you familiar with the incident?

If so, can you really say with a straight face that backing lines up for three hours and calling in additional people to bag check hundreds of bags to verify that the same book everyone was carrying was really a book was a good example of intelligent 'risk assessment'?

Profiling? Well, these were all women from a well-established and respected sorority. They were not Arabic-speaking shifty-eyed burka-wearing ladies with thick, heavy books in a foreign language. They were, however, black.

In other words, there was a clear shortage of common sense. With all due respect, if this had been a convention of US military vets all carrying a similar souvenir book, I suspect it would have been handled much differently.

This was a perfect opportunity for TSA to exercise 'risk assessment'. They failed and made themselves look like complete fools in the process. Oddly enough, it seems the BDOs were either too busy jacking their jaws or playing with their cellphones to assist.

petaluma1

You take it out of the bag, open the front and back cover, see there are pages and voila, it's a book. If it were a real issue, lines would be backed up to kingdom come with screeners looking through every book they come across or books would be banned in carry-ons. That they aren't, says books aren't a threat and if they are not a threat, there is no need to go leafing through pages.

chollie

If you seen hundreds of pax coming through with these books, one of the many duty-less TSOs could interrupt their personal conversation to quietly announce to all pax that if they are carrying the sorority book, it would greatly speed screening if they would remove the book and put it in a separate bin. Unless the TSOs were choosing to be deliberately punitive, there would be no need to bag-check the vast majority of bags.

A group of clever middle-school kids would have figured that one out quite quickly. Of course, kids in class aren't distracted by their cellphones and personal conversations and they are expected to focus on the assigned task.

Boggie Dog

Section 107, are you claiming that the two you mentioned are a TSA security threat?

Section 107

Ha, ha! They might be, but no, just pointing out when it comes to security screening one does not judge a book by its cover. Each inspection is taken on its own.

Hence, why grandparents and grandbabies need to be screened.

Look, if they didn't check the 501st book because the first 500 were benign and that 501st turned out to have a bomb in it many of the commenters here would be screaming "incompetence." Yet, those same folks are sounding off at how incompetent the screeners are because they did check each one. Whatever.

No doubt, TSA could and should have managed the situation much better. But it didn't occur because of the color of the passengers.

Boggie Dog

It may have been based on the color of the passengers unless you have direct evidence saying other factors were in play.

chollie

(bolding mine)

Yes. I realize TSA couldn't care less if people missed their flights.

However, I think I can safely guarantee that during that multi-hour mess, when they were calling in additional help, 90% of their focus was on black women's hair and black women's souvenir books.

Fortunately for me, the pax that TSA hates but is paid to protect, no bad male decided to do something bad that day while the TSOs were scrambling around checking each book and bag.

FliesWay2Much

Sorry -- I've been in & out of Hobby hundreds of times during Space Shuttle missions. There isn't a lot that goes on other than NASA events on the south side of the Houston metro area. Any TSA manager worth their salt (assuming there are any..) would have known that this annual conference was going on and would have prepared for a large number of young women with a certain souvenir book fly out out of Hobby on the same day. Unlike what happens ten miles south of Hobby, this isn't rocket science.

Boggie Dog

Seeing as how TSA has some history of profiling I am ready to believe that this incident could well be just one more case of TSA working outside of accepted policy.

I'm am always ready to reconsider if evidence is presented demonstrating my suspicions are incorrect.

petaluma1

I don't recall reading anything about hair searches as well as book searches, but before you posted that I'd wondered if they had also been searching hair that day.

WillCAD

I wonder if the 501st person in line that day was a white man with a copy of Trump's book Art of the Deal in his bag, would he have received the same screening as 500 black women did?