Just what I was thinking.

Bureaucracies and their ideas never go away. It's like Groundhog Day.

Yet what I site was no out in "public", as in any general location. It was at a specific location where people are asked to report unattended items or suspicious behavior. And it was not done. So I stand by what I said: people seemingly have to be taught to do this.

You're right.

"You've got to be taught to hate and fear, You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!"
Oscar Hammerstein, "South Pacific" (1949)

Most people know that 999,999 times out of a million*, an unattended bag in a public place, airport or otherwise, is just that: a lost or forgotten piece of luggage. Go to the lost-and-found of any airport, train station, bus terminal, department store, university, and look at all the stuff people leave behind. Actually, just the other day, someone from your airport said:
Forgetting something, especially given the numerous pressures of air travel, is far more common than being a terrorist. Orders of magnitude more common. And most people understand that. Unless you "teach" them.

*If TSA can make up statistics out of thin air, so can I.

Which is what I said!

I never said an unattended bag means there is trouble, or that suspicious activity means terrorist are lurking around the corner. If that's what your read into what I said, that's ok; we all have our biases and can't help but interject them into our conclusions.

And that TSO you cite, why, he's just brilliant!

Regarding those lost items TSA stores, as has been covered before those are items lost in a TSA area, such as the checkpoint. You would be surprised how many times a passenger tells something is left behind, either before or after the x-Ray, that they can describe the person who left the item.... And you want to smack them upside the head for not calling after the person who left the item. No they just watch them walk away.

Yes, most people need to be taught to report things, but it does not mean whY they report means terrible things are about to happen. Many times it's just helpful, so a person doesn't forget their bag, or we can return it to them, etc.

But as a society we do not. It's called the diffusion of responsibility.

http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch1...nsibility.html

So again, I stick by my claim that we have to be taught to report things.

This is a direct result of the TSA. People have been taught that if you act up at the checkpoint you will be punished. People are scared to make a scene by calling after a stranger no matter how innocent the outburst is.

Be sure to congratulate your superiors for a job well done.

No, I believe this is because of human nature and has nothing to do with TSA. Friend of mine works for a local shopping center, same story there, albeit different things in the lost and found, as people usually do not take luggage and such to the mall. And I remember many years ago I walked into a mcdonalds, sort of full, and I saw a man sitting by himself, upper body laid out on the table, arms thrashing, having some kind of seizure. No one helped him, no one called 911. I was the only one that helped, everyone else watched and ate their meals as I tried to help while paramedics came. No TSA back then (mid 90's).

No, in general people do not take responsibility for much around them, as the theory of the diffiusion of responsibility indicates. People often have to be taugh to do these things.

There is a large difference between someone that is having a medical problem and someone seeing a person set something down at the mall. Most people are scared to help a person in a medical emergency because they do not have training and are afraid they will make things worse. When a person has a seizure most do not know that the best thing to do is prevent them from crashing into stuff and let the seizure subside on its own. So any "help" given could be harmful.

Most people have their heads buried when they are in the mall. While they may see someone walk away from their purse it does not click that the person is forgetting the object.

In that link (no I did not read it all too many words for my tired brain) people were less likely to react when there were more people around. This is due to a lack of confidence that they will be able to help. When the subjects were fewer the response rate went up dramatically. (31% v. 85%)

The checkpoint is a wholly different dynamic. If you see someone leave something at the checkpoint you know they did not just wander a few feet away. You know that if you have any type of outburst you will be in trouble with the authorities. So instead of calling out to that person and calling unwanted attention to yourself, you tell the authority at the checkpoint.

You don't understand that most people are intimidated by the TSOs. You guys wear cop uniforms, you can deny passage at a whim, you can submit the PAX to humiliating procedures at a whim and you can call real LEOs and we all know at that point the PAX is screwed.

You guys scare the hell out of people. We feel we are walking through gangland wearing the wrong colors. Do nothing that draws attention and you may make it out unscathed.

I might have not explained something eariler, so I'll try to correct that now. Regarding things left at checkpoints, some times passengers tell us, sometimes they do not. There have been many times where something was left behind and people just march around it. They see it, cause they move out if the way, but seemingly care less that it was left.

I do not doubt that we intimidate people. I consider myself fairly kind and nice. I do not yell at people, i smile all the time at passengers even when I don't feel with, and I am careful of my body language. Yet I'm 6'4", 220 pounds, and I have had people tell me things like I'm glad your security, things like that. And I M nit the biggest guy here. And yes, the "cop" uniform scares people too, even on smaller people.

Yet, I still stand by what I said eariler. Even outside the airport, peeople often fail to help others, report things, whatever. Generally, people need to be taught to do these things.

The link I post cites a theory called dIffusion of responsibility - basically it claims the more people that are around, they tend to think other will take responsibility for whY needs to be done, which is why things often are not done (helping people, reporting a bag).

Regarding the medicle emergency at mcdonalds I walked into, I complained to the store manager after paramedics arrived as to why they didn't call for help. They said they though he was a drug user and sort of got what he deserved... Turns out he was on medication and missed taking a daily dosage.

And how is a passenger supposed to know that an item was left behind? Maybe the owner got sent back through the screening line again and will be along in a couple of people to claim their item. Maybe the owner was pulled aside for secondary screening, or requested a private screening, and didn't know that they should ask to have their belongings brought along with them.

There have been plenty of stories here where passengers have attempted to offer helpful suggestions to TSOs on duty, only to be told to mind their own business and move along, lest one be charged with "interfering with the screening process". Granted, not every helpful suggestion is actually helpful. But when a 6'4", 220lb. man wearing a uniform and an official-looking badge barks an order at you and threatens you with vaguely unspecified consequences if you don't comply ... you learn pretty quickly to mind your own business.

You want to train passengers to look out for others? Then train TSOs not to bark at passengers who are doing precisely that. You get the behavior you reward.

In Milwaukee, I've personally seen several incidents aboard Milwaukee County Transit System's buses and I'm glad that they have a reporting system in place. Sheriff's deputies have jurisdiction on these buses but they also employ Wackenhut private security. The former are used in cases where violence or the threat of violence has occurred and the latter for incidents where violence has not occurred and they occasionally ride along as a visible deterrent. More importantly, the private security personnel are not law enforcement and don't carry guns. The buses also have overhead surveillance cameras(eyes in the sky).

In one incident, I walked right into the middle of it. It was at night, the bus was packed when I got on, and everyone looked very tense. Every seat was taken except for this one in which this male was like sitting sideways taking up both seats. I stood in back and things were unusually quiet. We stopped a little further up ahead and Sheriff's deputies boarded talking with the bus driver who pointed out the male sitting sideways. From what I learned, this male had made death threats against a group of young women traveling together. What the idiot did not realize is that they had called 911(probably pretending it was one of their friends and talking softly) and the bus driver probably alerted the Sheriff's Office as well. They escorted the male off the bus, pulled the surveillance tape from its locked storage area, and then made all of us get off and get on another bus. My guess is they were treating the original bus as a crime scene.

In a second incident, this male was at the back of the bus and he was bad mouthing the driver. I walked into the middle of this one as well and this guy would not shut his mouth no matter how many times the bus driver ASKED him politely to do so. A little ahead, we stopped and Wackenhut security personnel entered, escorting the male off the bus. As we pulled away, they were still talking with him. Since there were no Sheriff's deputies around, I doubt that this guy was arrested. Had he resisted, that would have been another matter.

IMO, it is a reasonable initiative for school bus drivers. It's a reporting mechanism only. There are domestic terrorists out there as well as foreign terrorists. With our record unemployment rate, Federal/State/City cutbacks, and a worsening economy, I think it is a prudent measure.

Because, after all, we should always suspect anything remotely unusual. All hail conformity.

Nice how you use the height and weight I provided about myself and added the barking an order part! I don't bark, nor bite.

And I don't want to train passengers to look out for others. As passengers they have other things to concern themselves about. As humans, wouldn't it be nice if everyone did look out for each other? But I know enough about human nature to know that we encompass the entire spectrum of behaviors, from the noble to the dispicable.

My original point was this (and we've gone off in tangent here): people do not oftendo what they should, and yes, sometimes they have to be told and taught to look out for things, to report suspicious activity and lost misplaced bags. I still believe that, and I do not think it breeds hysteria or fear. To me such activities is the product of a responsible society.

I agree.

There is a huge difference between the unusual and suspicious. And reporting the suspicious (and even the unusual) says nothing about conformity.

It's responsible to teach a child not to run out in traffic. It's irresponsible to make them so afraid of cars and roads that they develop a phobia. (Note, I'm an engineer, not a mental health specialist.) It's responsible to ask people to let someone know about a bag that might have been forgotten. It's irresponsible, and breeds hysteria and fear, to imply that every lost bag is a bomb, as the tone at the airports does.

But I have a real problem with requesting people to report "suspicious activity," particularly in an airport. What's suspicious to one person might be completely innocent to most others. An office, a school, a shopping center are all reasonably predictable environments, with the same group of people doing very similar things day after day. But most people in an airport are only there infrequently. They're there for vastly different reasons: going to a job interview, moving house, arriving for a funeral, leaving on a honeymoon, breaking up with a spouse. Who is to say what's "normal" and what's suspicious? The BDOs, with their 7 days of training, do the same as if they stopped people at random. Why would average citizens do any better?

It also turns us into a nation of busy-bodies. It gives permission to eavesdrop on conversations, to stare at people that are different in some way, to take an unnatural interest in everybody else's activities.
There is very little difference between "unusual" and "suspicious" to many people. We all know someone who thinks the world would run much better if everyone would "just do it the way I do." And if reporting the unusual leads to someone being stopped for questioning, (or worse) then it is a very effective way of discouraging the unusual and rewarding conformity.

Case in point: Link Read post number 27 which is a first hand account by one of the men accused. A woman in Boston reported two guys because she thought she overheard them talking about explosives and drugs. They were delayed long enough to miss a flight for a weekend trip, which essentially cancelled their whole plans. She was never identified or held responsible for messing up these guy's weekend. Now multiply that by every lonely busy-body looking for 15 minutes of fame by reporting someone for what they thought they heard. Is that the world you want?

If you want to genuinely help someone out, yes, go ahead. If you see someone lighting a fire in the men's, or the fuse on an ACME bomb, or beating someone up, by all means, call the police. But if you just think that those people look odd, or that that woman said something unusual, mind your own business. Please.