Many Agencies Still Share Safety Chores
by Greg Schneider and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post
The seamless airport security system that Congress said it was designing last fall is actually a quilt of competing agencies, and its unfinished edges were exposed by Thursday’s shootings at Los Angeles International Airport.
The Transportation Security Administration, created by lawmakers to impose federal control over airport security, said it had no jurisdiction over the crime because it occurred at a ticket counter, outside the area where TSA operates. “We’re responsible for security at the checkpoint and on the aircraft,” said TSA spokesman Greg Warren. “It’s hard to say we’d take action on this.”
Instead, it was an El Al airline agent who subdued the shooter, local police who secured the scene and FBI agents who will conduct an investigation. The TSA, its officials said, will simply observe.
Some on Capitol Hill didn’t buy that argument yesterday.
“This was a fundamental policy change to take aviation security responsibility and give it to TSA, in the sense that this is homeland security, and homeland defense is an inherently governmental and federal function,” said a House Republican staffer involved in writing the legislation that established the TSA.
But many factors would work against any TSA effort to take over every detail of airport security. For instance, TSA officials want to hire hundreds of law-enforcement officers to conduct patrols at airports, but appropriators in Congress want to hold down the size of the agency.
In addition, most local airport operators are reluctant to give up their domain to federal law-enforcement agents.
“Our members generally - actually, universally - want to minimize federal presence at their airports,” said Richard Marchi, senior vice president of technology and environmental affairs at the Airports Council International-North America, a group representing airport operators.
The airports’ own security forces, or in many cases local police, continue to have responsibility for security at parking garages, perimeter fencing and entrances to terminals.
The FBI has agents stationed in all large airports. Airlines have security personnel of their own, but only El Al is known to have armed agents at ticket counters, experts said.
The TSA’s broad mandate from Congress was simply laid over the existing patchwork of interlocking responsibilities, and “how that will work in the future . . . leads me to some confusion,” said Douglas R. Laird, a consultant and former head of security at Northwest Airlines.
The crucial job of coordinating all those groups will fall to one person at each of the nation’s 429 commercial airports: the TSA federal security director.
Each director will have to use political skills as well as security savvy to keep so many disparate groups working smoothly and to focus them on a common vision of airport security, Laird said.
So far, the TSA has hired only 47 federal security directors nationwide and only 25 are on the job, agency spokesman Warren said. On Tuesday, the agency appointed retired admiral David M. Stone as the federal security director for Los Angeles International, but he hasn’t yet been through any training or orientation.
In the meantime, the TSA relies has been relying on a former Federal Aviation Administration security official to be its interim coordinator at LAX.
TSA officials said yesterday that agency representatives at a few airports, such as Chicago’s O’Hare International, decided on their own to beef up security in response to the LAX shooting.
In the Washington region, officials at Baltimore-Washington International, Dulles and Reagan National airports all said they were already on full alert and had posted no additional patrols since July 4.
Warren said his agency was treating the LAX shooting as an “isolated incident” best left to local authorities and the FBI.
Ticket counters are similar to “any other public place,” Warren said. “It’s the same as whether you would go to a baseball stadium, you’d have local law enforcement patroling the areas.”
Marchi, of the airport operators group, pointed out that in late May a man shot two people near the ticket counters at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, but he noted that it received little media attention.
“At LAX, 62 million passengers go through there a year,” Marchi said. “Think of it in the context of 62 million folks. Think of the murder rate of New York City. It’s clearly a problem, but some of those [murders] are going to happen at airports.
The spokesman for a group representing the major airlines said he worried that drastic steps to prevent such incidents, such as moving checkpoints ahead of ticket counters, would lengthen passenger waits and cause more problems than they would solve.
“I don’t think we need to necessarily make our airports into fortress structures, in essence making them inaccessible,” said Michael Wascom, spokesman for the Air Transport Association. “We just need to look at what happened [at LAX] but not overreact, since this appears to be isolated and not necessarily a terrorist act.”
But one key legislator - Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee on aviation - said the TSA’s lack of response to the LAX shooting shows how far the agency has to go to achieve better security throughout the air travel system.
“The TSA . . . is supposed to be looking at all aspects of [security], not just building a bureaucracy at the checkpoints,” Mica said.