woman arrested for groping TSA supervisor

[tinylegacies]

Despite the fact that thousands of TSA agents across the country engage in similar behavior on a daily basis, a woman was arrested after she turned the tables on the federal agency and groped a TSA supervisor in protest at her treatment

Comments

[chaya]

Very mixed feelings about this.

[kyra_neko_rei]

Yeah.

I mean, if your assertion is that the touch in question is wrong, maybe doing it to someone else is not the way to go. She seems to be relying on a sort of "if that's okay, then THIS is okay" that undermines her basic premise.

On the other hand, that doesn't actually say anything about the legitimacy of her complaint, and if it's worth her being arrested for, it's definitely worth a look into the acceptability of the first agent doing it to her.

[kyra_neko_rei]

Yeah . . . it gets muddled up, though---her premise and actions end up simultaneously depending on it being wrong AND it being not wrong.

Her timing was off. It would've worked after the supervisor gave hir opinion on whether it was wrong or not, or it would've worked if she'd done it to the person who'd done it to her in the first place.

[girly123]

While I'm interested to see what kind of precedent this sets, I'm annoyed that the article is painting TSA officers as dastardly molestation bandits and not as people who are ordered to carry out acts that they're overwhelmingly really uncomfortable to have to do. Yeah, you get the newsworthy cases of TSA officers being inexcusably awful to passengers, but a lot of them are just stuck in a shitty job with no union protection and being blamed for having to enforce laws that they had no hand in creating.

tl;dr: The shit that the TSA does is awful, but I'm kind of loathe to blame it on the individual TSA officer unless they're being uniquely horrendous.

[skellington1]

Yeah, I wish they'd unpacked the sentence "a violation of the protocols she herself had been trained to carry out", because if that's actually the case the specific TSA agent was out of line -- but if that's not the case and it's TSA SOP, it's just another example of the systemic idiocy of security theater, not the poor bastard stuck working the job.

[tinylegacies]

I think the most interesting thing about this article to me is the fact that she was a TSA officer. Presumably, she knows what is acceptable and felt she was violated.

[girly123]

Oh, good point. I missed that part.

[tinylegacies]

The vibe I got from the article was that she went to complain about the inappropriateness and demonstrated how she was touched - not that she lashed out and groped back.

I'm not sure if that makes it right.

[sesmo]

I think she got the "this is what we're supposed to do" bull from the TSA supervisor, and when she argued that they did it differently than how she was trained to do it (I assume with hands inward rather than back of hand), then she said, "no, this is what they did!" and demonstrated.

It's all a little weird. BUT having the government argue that touching like that is assault, in court, will be fascinating. If it is, then the TSA has a problem.

[qable]

That's how I read it, too, and I'd like to see more information on just what happened between Price and the supervisor to clear up the ambiguity in the article.

[xbriyeon]

You're joking, right. What the fuck is it called when the security guard that was touching her chest and genitals? Legalized violence? -____-

Hypocritical bullshit.