Major League Baseball fans glided past the ticket takers at Tropicana Field on October 3 for the playoff matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers.
However, a couple hours later and some ten miles away, National Football League fans attending the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts game at Raymond James Stadium got a different greeting.
The NFL’s recent mandate of enhanced pat-downs was in full force. The new procedure calls for expanding the customary pat-downs to regions below the knees.
On October 3, minutes before the Bucs-Colts game kickoff, fans seemed nonplussed by the whole affair.
When pat-downs were started in 2005 in response to 9/11, Tampa became a focal point regarding legal questions about the constitutionality of pat-downs (for details see www.hackneypublications.com/sla/archive/000543.php) when a local high school government teacher filed a lawsuit that claimed the searches were unconstitutional. An injunction was ordered by a federal court, which delayed implementing the policy; but an appeals court later lifted the injunction.
In a news release, the Tampa Sports Authority, a named defendant in past litigation, was proactive in explaining the NFL’s enhanced pat-down procedure.
“The current pat-down procedure … entails an unobtrusive head-to-waist inspection for persons of all ages. Pat-downs will be done expeditiously by highly trained individuals of the same gender, done with the back of the hand; women will search women and men will search men. Fans that refuse pat-downs will not be admitted into Raymond James Stadium.”
“Fans who tender a ticket and consent to such searches, waive any related claim against the stadium landlord, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the NFL and their respective agents.”
The drama may be over, and for good reason, according to Peter C. Kranske, president and director of Landmark Event Staffing Services, Inc. “A thorough pat down is a good deterrent to fans who are trying to bring unauthorized items into the venue,” he told Sports Litigation Alert.
The change may have been precipitated by an incident at New Jersey’s Met Life Stadium, where a man was charged with assault after bringing a stun gun into the facility undetected and using it on another fan during a fight.
