Bra sets off alarm

A Bonners Ferry woman says she was humiliated when security guards at the federal courthouse in Coeur d’Alene told her she’d have to remove her underwire bra to get inside.

Lori Plato said she was going into the courthouse for a hearing Sept. 20 when the metal detector went off as she passed through security.

“When I walked through, the gentleman said, ‘Do you have an underwire bra on?’ ” Plato said. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You have to remove it.’ “

But there was nowhere private to remove her bra, she said. The guards suggested she go out to her car to do it.

Instead, Plato – who describes herself as “not petite” – said she removed her bra while her husband tried to shield her from view of others in the crowded lobby by holding up his coat.

She said she had to put the bra on a conveyor belt and send it through an X-ray machine.

“After I got through the metal detector and waited for my bra to come through the conveyor belt, one of the security guards said, ‘That’s a girl,’ ” Plato said. She thought the guard was making fun of her.

The U.S. Marshal’s Service, which supervises security at the courthouse, said Plato was given options and chose not to exercise them. She was told she could have gone to her car or to a neighboring business to remove the bra, U.S. Marshal Patrick McDonald said.

“She’s inflating it,” McDonald said.

He said Plato turned her back on the security officers, who thought she was simply going to talk to her husband.

“All of a sudden she just took it off,” McDonald said. “It wasn’t anything we wanted to happen, and it wasn’t anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”

Though he said Plato wasn’t ordered to remove her bra, McDonald said she was told she couldn’t pass through security wearing it.

He also said Plato is the first person he knows of who has been asked to remove a bra at the courthouse. Ordinarily, bras don’t set off the metal detectors, he said.

“I don’t think they’re considered a weapon, really, the last time I looked,” he said.

When Plato contacted the Marshal’s Service office seeking an apology, Plato said, she was told the guards could have been more sensitive, but no apology was offered.

She also said the Marshal’s Service told her that other women had been asked to remove their bras in the past and some simply left the courthouse. But McDonald said he was unaware of similar instances or complaints.

There are private areas on the first floor of the courthouse, McDonald said, but it wasn’t an option for Plato to use those rooms to remove her bra because there were no female guards to accompany her past the checkpoint.

At the Kootenai County Courthouse, Peter Barnes, the head of security, said he’s not aware of an underwire bra ever setting off metal detectors there.

If that were to occur, Barnes said, security guards likely would use a handheld wand to sweep over the woman’s chest.

“We never run into a problem where we thought anything like that was a weapon or looked like a weapon,” he said.

McDonald declined to discuss other ways the federal courthouse guards could have screened Plato. “I don’t want to get into security matters,” he said.

Nobody should be forced to remove their undergarments to enter the courthouse, Plato said.

“It was very humiliating,” her husband, Owen Plato, said Wednesday.

“They could have handled it with a much more professional attitude. There should have been a privacy screen there at the very least.”