DUH: When you empower nitwits to use their 'discretion' you get abuse of power.

[doc_strange]

I very much encourage you to read the LJ post by mephron linked to below (even if you skip the rest of this post).

Ok, we've been having 'random' searches at airports for a while now, and a lot of people have reported it's not even close to random. People who are off from mainstream reportedly find themselves searched "for security" "randomly" on each and every leg of their journeys. The security folks haven't had anything close to the training we typically give police forces, and there's reports enough over the last 10 years of inappropriate police profiling. So it's not much wonder that these minimally-trained security folks can't shake the idea that they're looking for 'someone doing or having something wrong' whether it's a security 'wrong' or not. I guess we thus find them feeling like they should search anyone they find weird.

More or less, we're back in the 1950s -- the 1950s USSR. It should thus come as no wonder then that we're starting to hear about security personnel abusing the power of search and seizure to enforce their personal beliefs on the unsuspecting, defenseless public. In this era of hype, we have forgotten to up the penalties on abuse of power. 50 to 1 says the abusive guard -- at worst -- gets reprimanded or fired. I believe he should be slapped in prison as the worst kind of terrorist: the kind that, given a sacred trust, abuses it to harm those he's sworn to protect.

Comments

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Your airline stories, plus several consistent harassments that I directly witnessed, were what I immediately thought of. You're right -- the guard will probably feel he was in the right. It's hard enough finding good police personnel; when you expand the realm so wide, you will get the ones with their own, special axe to grind (which the police academy might have weeded out already).