Harpy - Not exactly the best reason I have heard :rolleyes:

If the guy was susceptible to that he would be found out under PV - dont forget that it doesn't stop just because you made it over the first hurdle.

Me thinks you are clutching at straws now.... :confused:

Deconehead,
You may well imagine a traffic cop with a gun. I am reliably informed that the Rapid Response Firearm teams are in fact more often than not - "traffic cops"!

I dont normally bother with the ignorant posts that we sometimes get on these forums but the level of some of the anti-authority, anti-police posts is so low it beggars belief. I cannot believe professionals can have such opinions and the view given in recent threads that pprune is becoming a turn off becomes more and more understandable.

Spouting off about very serious subjects (e.g. police shootings) in obvious ignorance is reprehensible.

Some of you should be very ashamed. I sincerely hope you are non-aviation infiltrators.

All professions have a few idiotic people - police included. This is because they are human beings like eveyone else.

sapco2, thanks for enlightening me, a whole new world has opened up to me.

:rolleyes:

Julian
You have a touching faith in positive vetting. I dare say Burgess, McLean & Philby were positively vetted. And how many bank managers have been forced to open the safe for the crooks while their wives & children were held hostage? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the customs officers to have to undergo the same routine checks as the rest of us.

OH PLEASE!! LET'S LIGHTEN UP A LITTLE BIT, HUH? THIS IS ONE OF "OUR" GUYS. THE GOOD GUYS. AN INSPECTOR IS A HIGH RANKING OFFICIAL WHO IS WAY ABOVE THE "LITTLE PEOPLE" AT THE CHECKPONTS. MIGHT AS WELL PUT A LEASH AND MUZZLE ON EVERYONE

Thats what I am trying to get through to Harpy, I think its a losing battle though. He would be better off as one of the Lone Gunmen from the X-files as according to him no one is safe.

Better not give the pilots a gun then Harpy mate the pilots could be blackmailed into doing things they shouldn't like the bank managers eh??? - you never know, with your level of paranoia, they be an alien conspriracy from another world :D :D :D

I've read a lot of posts on this subject regarding the fact that the comment was a 'joke'. My point being is at the time how does the security guy know that it's a 'joke' the moment it's said?. From his point (as I understand the story) he finds a penknife in the police officers bag, the next thing the person in front of him, who he doesn't know from Adam, says something to the affect that 'careful you might find my gun'. Confronted with that kind of statement at anytime, not just post the events of the 11th of September he has to take it seriously. As for wether the comment was made as the result of a question, thus constituting an offence, it's conceivable that the security guy asked him something along the lines of 'is there anything else I might find in your bag?'. If the 'I've got a gun comment' was made as a result of that sort of question then I would contend that an offence has been commited. Also just because the officer produced a warrant card to somehow justify his comments is irrelevant as again at the time the comment was made the security guy didn't know (or shouldn't care) that the persons bag he was searching is/was a police officer. Also it's not unknown for hijackers to use fake documents, so why not a fake warrant card. Taking all things into account I feel the security guy acted correctly in refusing to allow the passenger to proceed until the facts could be verified.

Pash,

On the 'evidence' produced in this post, no offence! You can speculate all you like about what he was asked, however it will be just that, speculation. At the end of the day, having been a policeman at an airport, and dealt with the so called jokes, I have to say there is good and bad on both sides. No pax should not make funnies, but then there is such a thing as over reaction, which this quite frankly appears to have been. Now as I said I was a policeman, and nailing my colours to the mast, I would probably let my opinons sway towrds him, except I had no love for 'senior' police officers, nor for traffic officers who seemed to take great delight in causing bad feeling with the public. As i said I have dealt with hundreds of these jokes, from pilots, from cabin crew, from solicitors and most other proffessions, the end result for them, a minor B*****ing. Why should any other proffession be treated differnatly from them?
As regards to the very silly comments about Police shootings. Try this one for size...Its dark, you have reliable information that a man has a gun, you see the man in question who has a long object in his hand, its wrapped in a plastic bag, he is about 30 yards away from you ...you shout at him 'Armed Police Drop the bag!' You are in uniform, you are standing by a large white car marked with the words POLICE in flourencent letters...The man raises the object towards you...You have 1 second to decide what to do...!

Think that over before you make any more silly comments!

bjcc
I concur 100 per chuffin' cent
we aim to please, it keeps the cleaners happy

Julian
I didn’t know you were an X-Files enthusiast. I had been getting an overwhelming feeling that fantasists were taking over the forum but I had put it down to paranoia. It now seems I’m not going mad after all. You should add it to your list of interests as a warning to others.

Guys,
This is an aviation forum and not the place to discuss the politics of police shootings but as a police firearms officer who is just about to finish my ATPL(f) I have to reply to Harpy.

You have given two examples of 'innocent' people being shot by police.
The first example in Brighton..Mr Ashley.a fine upstanding member of the commumity who had only 86 convictions for mainly violence ,firearms and drugs including killing another human being.
A highly trained firearms team entered the flat that morning,the first officer in being PC Chris Sherwood a fine honourable family guy doing the right thing because he believed in right and wrong. The team attempts to enter by stealth but the door has been barricaded with steel bars(as you do) so has to be broken open.(The following is from PC Sherwoods statement)PC Sherwood is then greeted by a naked Mr Ashley who has his hands behind his back.PC Sherwood issues a challenge of armed police to Ashley and Ashley points his hands towards Sherwood as if holding a gun.Sherwood in the half light shoots Ashley once in the chest which proves fatal.
There are two witnesses to this..The 18 year old girlfriend in bed with Ashley and the firearms officer behind Sherwood.Predictably you might say the other firearms officer coroborates Sherwood and the 18 year old girl states that Ashley raised his hands above his head and Sherwood executed him.On the basis of what she said Sherwood was charged with murder.
The pathologist assigned to this case was Dr Ian West(the pathologist from the Fred and Rose West trials). His evidence was that the only way that Ashley could have been standing when he was shot was with his arms held out in front of him and that the girlfriends evidence was lies.On the first day of the trial the judge stated that there was no case to answer after 18 months of hell for PC Sherwood...would you do this job???.The reason that heads rolled on this was because the firearms team were given false information by the management(ie there was good information that a firearm was in the premises when this was utterly false)
Thankfully Chris is getting his life back together again and has moved back in with his wife and children and will hopefully one day return to being the man he was( Sorry Harpy who was the innocent victim in this)

As regards the shooting of Harry Stanley in Hackney with the chair leg I am involved in this ongoing case and cannot comment further except to say read bjcc's post

Ps I really wanna fly planes for a living instaed of this

You know - I read the first page of this thread, then skipped to the last, and still the same old diatribe ... with the exception of some confusing references to police shootings....

My point - we are all very quick to jump on journalists' representations of events when they are about our business. They get it wrong. They take things out of context. They make it up. They misquote. And yes, they also get it right.

Yet as soon as it comes to this incident - everyone believes the report word for word, and the next thing I see is a virtual lynch mob, baying for the end of this man's career.... a man who's history or life is unknown to you. No question of the integrity of the report!! Unbelievable!!

My guess is that this was taken out of context, out of character, maybe... in the heat of the moment, tempers rising a little, a fragment of a longer discussion?

I only hope that if I, and I touch wood I wont, ever get involved in an incident at work, I never have any of you lot trying to lynch me before you even know what happened.

Speculation, fine, but come on guys!!

The flying gunman.
Thank you for giving us a clearer understanding of the Ashley case, I now withdraw some comments based on your facts. However, I will still never trust a traffic cop, they do cause a lot of mistrust and ill feeling towards your profession.

I wish you well with the ATPL, let's hope it isn't too long before we need more pilots again. :) :)

Harpy I am quite happy and not paranoid. Have a read back through your posts where apparently everyone is going to be blackmailed into bringing firearms onto planes for terrorists.

BTW, writing this from CA. Although enhanced security was in effect no part of getting out of the the UK or into the US was dehumanising - everything professionally done. So maybe it could be your paranoia about being a pax or maybe you just wind the security staff up!

Julian.

A point that hasn't been covered is the problem of language misunderstanding. Yes, it's stupid to joke, but let's suppose we have a security officer with a broad accent questioning someone whose command of English (or whatever the local language) is dubious. A classic example of this was a few years back where a German on a plane from Miami (IIR American Airlines) was bursting for a pee. The seatbelt sign was on and he used the German expression 'I am exploding'- because his English wasn't very good... The FA thought he was making a bomb threat, the flight returned and he was in jail for some time. IIR, the judge threw the case out.....

Now consider the passenger travelling with professional equipment - say a bomb calorimeter, or even someone taking an ice cream bombe - correct terms, but not necessarily in everyday English. Declaration of these in checked baggage, especailly by a non native English speaker could well lead to all sorts of problems, so in the end security people need a lot of training in the sort of things they need to meet. Could easily lead to them thinking something is a threat or joke when it isn't.

The problem of hypodermics is another one that can't be readily answered. Or do you tell people needing injections that they can't fly?

BTW, are there still scissors in the on board first aid kits?

To supplement what TFG has said, PC Sherwood should never have been put into this position on what, in some accounts, may have been his first ever armed raid. I was also surprised to read that each raid member had been issued with 55 rounds of ammunition. I wonder what they were expecting. The Kent Police inquiry into the shooting concluded there had been "a complete corporate failure in duty to society" in Sussex. Police inspectors doing a "risk assessment" found Sussex Police fell below the standard in 18 out of 19 performance indicators. Yet apart from Mr Whitehouse, it is not clear if anyone has suffered as a result,apart from PC Sherwood.