Two TSA Officers working at Denver International Airport have been fired after it was discovered that they allegedly conspired to pre-select certain flyers for enhanced screening, at which point they would grope them in ways that can only be described as criminal:
The Transportation Security Administration has fired two screeners for conspiring to fondle male passengers as they came through a security checkpoint at Denver International Airport.
One of the screeners, a man, signaled to a female colleague when a man he found attractive was coming through the scanning machine.
The woman then pressed a touchscreen button indicating that the man being screened was actually a woman, according to a Denver police report of the allegations.
The scanner than alerted screeners that it had found an oddity in the area of the genitals, triggering a physical pat down of the passenger’s groin, the police report said.
In a statement, the TSA said: “These alleged acts are egregious and intolerable. TSA has removed the two officers from the agency. All allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated by the agency. And when substantiated, employees are held accountable.”
An anonymous employee contacted the TSA in November 2014, and told them a male screener had told her that “he ‘gropes’ males who come through the screening area,” according to the report.
The agency had an investigator observe the screening area.
On Feb. 9, the investigator noticed the male screener give a signal to the woman who controlled the touchscreen system.
When a male Southwest Airlines passenger entered the scanner, the investigator noticed the woman “press the screening button for a female,” the report said.
The male screener then conducted “a pat down of the passenger’s front groin and buttocks area with the palms of his hands, which is contradictory to TSA searching policy,” the report said.
Under questioning by the investigator, the female screener admitted that she had responded to her fellow screener’s signals at least 10 times.
She knew that doing so would allow him to perform a pat down on a male passenger that he found attractive, the report said.
TSA special agent Charles Stone contacted the police sex crimes unit on March 19 and gave a detective the information, but prosecutors declined to pursue the case without a known victim, the report said.
In a follow-up report, The Denver Post is reporting that two potential victims of this groping had contacted authorities in the wake of this report, and it’s quite possible that the news will prompt others who may have been victims of this scheme to come forward as well. Additionally, once authorities are able to verify dates and times with these potential victims, there may well be video evidence confirming their stories. At that point, it would seem inevitable that criminal charges of some kind would be forth coming. At the very least, something like this would seem to qualify as sexual assault, or whatever it might be called under Colorado law, and in that case both the male employee who committed the act and the female employee who aided and abetted the scheme would be potentially criminally liable.
It’s been awhile since the TSA was in the news, although it’s still hard to find anyone that finds dealing with the agency and its scanning procedures to be anything resembling a pleasant experience. Several years ago, when reports of TSA abuse and misconduct were running rampant, it seemed as though things such as this were an almost daily occurrence. In fact, this isn’t the first time that the Denver International TSA has been in the news for in appropriate conduct. Back in 2010, similar allegations were made by flyers traveling from DIA and the Denver Post uncovered evidence suggesting it was far more common than the TSA was admitting. Given that, and given the relatively lax background checks that TSA employees go throw, one has to wonder whether similar schemes have happened at other airports.
