A 41-year-old Clarksville woman was arrested after Nashville airport authorities say she was belligerent and verbally abusive to security officers, refusing for her daughter to be patted down at a security checkpoint.
Andrea Fornella Abbott yelled and swore at Transportation Security Administration agents Saturday afternoon at Nashville International Airport, saying she did not want her daughter to be “touched inappropriately or have her “crotch grabbed,” a police report states.
After the woman refused to calm down, airport police said, she was charged with disorderly conduct and taken to jail. She has been released on bond.
Attempts to reach Abbott on Tuesday were unsuccessful. The report does not list her daughter’s age. The mother and daughter were traveling from Nashville to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines.
“(She) told me in a very stern voice with quite a bit of attitude that they were not going through that X-ray,” Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer, told police.
“No, it’s not an X-ray,” she told Abbott. “It is 10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram.”
“I still don’t want someone to see our bodies naked,” Abbott said, according to the police report.
At one point, Abbott tried unsuccessfully to take a video with her cellphone.
TSA policy revised
The arrest comes on the heels of public outrage over a video showing a pat-down of a 6-year-old girl at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. The April video prompted a new policy that took effect last month in which airport security screeners must try to avoid invasive pat-down searches of children.
TSA says it will instruct screeners how to make repeated attempts to screen young children without invasive pat-downs. The instructions should reduce the number of pat-downs on children, TSA says.
Contact Erin Quinn at 726-5986 or equinn@tennessean.com.
From 06/23/2011 1:31 PM
Airport security screeners must try to avoid invasive pat-down searches of children, the head of the Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday.
The policy change, announced by TSA Administrator John Pistole at a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing, follows public outrage in April over a video showing a pat-down of a 6-year-old girl at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
The TSA has been criticized for intrusive pat-downs of children and elderly travelers.
The agency says it will instruct airport screeners at checkpoints how to make repeated attempts to screen young children without invasive pat-downs. The instructions should reduce the number of pat-downs on children, the TSA says.
"As part of our ongoing effort to get smarter about security, Administrator Pistole has made a policy decision to give security officers more options for resolving screening anomalies with young children," TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball says.
Former Federal Aviation Administration security director Billie Vincent criticized the policy change but said he, too, is disturbed by intrusive pat-downs of young children.
"The TSA is walking a tightrope, trying to quiet the public damage," says Vincent, who is now a security consultant in Chantilly, Va.
Vincent says intrusive pat-downs would rarely be needed if Congress would stop considering profiling "a dirty word" and allow the TSA to profile everyone — including young children's parents — before a flight. Pat-downs would be needed only for young children whose parents raise a red flag during the profiling process, he says.
The TSA says it expects to test an identity-based screening option for some passengers later this year. Under the program, travelers would voluntarily provide background information about themselves and possibly qualify for expedited screening.
On Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, decided to revive a state bill that would criminalize intrusive pat-downs by airport security screeners.
The bill would make it a criminal offense to touch "the anus, sexual organ, buttocks or breast of another person" during screening.
The Texas House has passed the bill, but it stalled in the Senate after John Murphy, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, warned that passage would interfere with the government's ability to ensure travelers' safety and result in flight cancellations.
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