Sunday, September 08, 2002
Crime falls, jitters intensify in airport vigilance
By James Pilcher, jpilcher@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HEBRON — Before Sept. 11, the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport police were most likely to be called out to arrest a suspected drug trafficker, to confiscate a toy gun spotted on an X-ray machine or to scold an airline worker not properly wearing his ID.
The terrorist attacks changed all that, turning the airport into an anxious place.
In the past year, crime has dropped sharply. But the force has been kept busy by travelers and airport workers calling police for anything from a person wearing a turban to someone carrying a picture of Osama bin Laden in his wallet to a new employee asking for a pilot's uniform.
An Enquirer analysis of records of individual responses by airport police dating to 1998 shows:
The number of runs for a “suspicious activity, person or article” has drastically increased, even though there are fewer fliers and only ticketed passengers are allowed beyond security checkpoints.
Police responded to such calls 1,353 times between Sept. 11, 2001, and Aug. 20. For almost two years before the attacks — from the beginning of 2000 until Sept. 11 — there were only 984 of those calls.
In addition, there were no calls involving potential bomb threats between January 2000 and Sept. 10, 2001, but 10 such calls since the attacks.
Yet airport officials say that since the attacks, not a single call has uncovered a legitimate threat.
Reports of the kinds of crime previously associated with the airport — drug trafficking, pick-pocketing and the like — are way down in the past year compared with years past.
The number of calls to respond to a potential weapon found by screeners at security checkpoints is also down.
There are fewer incidents on the airport's ramp involving workers not showing proper ID or not following proper security protocols.
The records, which include police responses from 1998 through Aug. 20, were obtained through an open-records request to officials at the airport, the nation's 24th-busiest.
They are the closest look that the public can get at the state of local airport security, since most other records are off limits because of provisions in the Kentucky open-records law and the federal Freedom of Information Act. Both prohibit the release of security-sensitive information.
Airport Police Chief Chuck Melville acknowledges a “handful” of records were not released, either because they involve open investigations or could disclose security-sensitive information.
Still, Chief Melville says the records paint a fairly accurate picture of what the airport police have dealt with over the past year and the changes the attacks caused.
“It's coming back to normal in the past few months, but people are still more aware of what is around them and they're definitely more willing to say something,” says Chief Melville, who oversees the airport's 43-officer police force.
“And we'll respond to all those calls, because if we blow off one saying it is probably nothing, then that will be the one where there might be a legitimate threat.”
Still, the records don't answer the question of whether security is tighter now than before the attacks, especially since neither the airport police department nor airport administrators are directly responsible for passenger screening.
Undercover tests
In fact, the only other information regarding that came from a round of undercover tests of passenger screeners conducted in June, the first such tests since the federal government became directly responsible for the function.
Cincinnati airport screeners, who until last week were employed by private companies directly overseen by federal officials, had the worst failure rate in the nation on this particular round of testing, failing to find fake weapons and bombs either on people or in carry-on luggage seven out of 12 times.
Officials with the federal Transportation Security Administration, the agency created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to oversee aviation security, would not specifically comment on the records, saying only that security is better than it was before Sept. 11 and it will continue to get tougher.
The agency is replacing the private screeners with federal employees nationwide and locally.
It has hired 303 of the 320 or so screeners it will need for passenger checkpoints here, and the TSA took over the screening function at the airport Wednesday.
“Failures of any kind are unacceptable, and we've worked out a corrective action plan for this airport,” says Terry Burgess, the TSA's recently installed federal security director for the Cincinnati airport.
“But it's unfair that Cincinnati is taking the bad rap over one slice of testing. All the officials here are innovators and very capable.
“And while I can't comment specifically on (the response records), you're probably seeing that (more suspicious calls, less crime calls) all over the country.”
Chief Melville acknowledges that his staff has spent most of its time over the last year investigating calls involving “suspicious” persons or activities, adding that many of those responses were in the days and weeks following the attacks.
Expanded staff
To deal with the new burden of not only providing backup to screener checkpoints but responding to all these calls, Chief Melville has expanded his force.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, he had 39 officers on the force, and five left in the past year.
He was able to hire a total of eight more after the attacks, although he does not have his full contingent, which he says is 45 officers.
In addition, a new public safety assistant position was created to help manage traffic and other safety issues at the airport, with 25 of those hired to free up police officers for other duties.
Chief Melville says that the additional help has allowed his officers to keep up their training for spotting possible terrorist threats.
But he expects the workload to remain heavy, with travelers and airport workers alike worried about things that might not have raised an eyebrow prior to Sept. 11.
For example, there were at least three calls in the past year involving someone writing down the tail numbers of airplanes — a common and harmless practice among aviation enthusiasts who want to research the safety history of a particular jet.
The number of calls over an unattended piece of luggage in the terminal or lobby also spiked tremendously, with most of those being resolved when the owner showed up, with other bags being turned over to Delta Air Lines, the airport's largest tenant.
None of these “suspicious” calls have resulted in an arrest or even were connected with a terrorist threat.
Chief Melville says others show the fine line the police must walk.
One involved a disturbance in a long line at the security checkpoint, with a passenger berating another traveler who was wearing a turban, saying that the man was responsible for the wait and for the added security.
The man wearing the turban was not even of Middle Eastern descent or a Muslim, recalls Chief Melville, who says such misunderstandings have become relatively common.
“I even have an officer who speaks Farsi, and believe me, he has been busy over the past year,” he says.
“A lot of the time, we try to explain the situation to those who called us and we definitely present ourselves to those who are the suspects, so to speak, to explain why we are there. But it is a balance, and we're not going to not respond to any call, no matter what it is, and we have to take every one seriously.”
There are several records of calls involving passengers who are described as “Middle Eastern” or “Arab.” Police were even called out once because someone found a newspaper with Arabic writing on it.
Also common: a call to the police because a passenger's name matches that of someone on the FBI's “no-fly list,” which includes names of known or suspected terrorists.
“This last year has been a definite education in the different aspects of Islamic and Arabic names, that's for sure,” says Chief Melville, who says none of the passengers involved was actually on the list.
“There might only be two parts of the name on the list, but the whole name is not even close. Still, we get called, and we have to check it out.”
Majed Dabdoub, president of the Islamic Association of Greater Cincinnati and a native of Lebanon, says that many Arab-Americans have chosen not to fly at all, especially not in the next week or so due to the coming anniversary, because they are immediately under suspicion.
“It's a reality that we are being discriminated against and we realize that things have changed,” says Mr. Dabdoub, a Montgomery engineer. “But who decides what Middle Eastern is? I'll still travel, even though my wife and daughters wear the traditional head scarves, but it's because of this that many are canceling their trips or driving.”
Emphasis shifts
Before Sept. 11, the airport police had put an emphasis on driving out drug traffic, and airport officials say that such crime was already dropping when the attacks occurred.
Still, the police have made only 53 drug calls so far this year, compared with 93 in 2001.
Chief Melville and Chad Everett, who as the airport's deputy director of operations oversees security issues for the airport administration, acknowledge that the prospect of tighter security at airports may have scared away many drug “mules” along with other potential criminals.
They also agree that the fact that only those with tickets are allowed in terminals and the lower number of passengers flying could be contributing to the drops, although Chief Melville says that a level of drug traffic remains, even with tighter security.
Officials with airport consulting firms and national airport associations said there had been no evidence that such airport crime was on the decline, but that it makes sense it would be falling.
“Overall, criminals are probably less likely to use commercial air transport to move a stash of drugs or whatever and they certainly won't want to go through this Gestapo-like zone that airports have become,” says Michael Boyd, a Colorado-based aviation consultant who works with several airports and airlines nationally.
Renewed efforts
Airport officials say that other trends revealed by the records show that security is tighter locally, including the decline in the number of ramp citations and calls for ramp violations post-Sept. 11.
Mr. Everett says that after the attacks, airlines made a renewed effort to follow security protocols for getting into secure areas, while the airport has streamlined its rules and laws on the subject, laying out the penalties for those who are caught several times.
The first offense of an unauthorized entry or exit from a secured area, for example, brings a seven-day suspension of a worker's ID, which is needed to get to their work area in most cases. The airport also reserves the right to permanently pull an ID if the behavior continues.
“There are even some airlines who have pushed us to be tougher on this, especially since 9-11,” Mr. Everett says.
When it comes to weapons, real or pretend, at the checkpoints, Chief Melville says that the decline in response calls for weapons shows that the public is paying better attention to what it packs in its luggage.
“It still amazes me how many people don't remember,” Chief Melville says. “But we're starting to get through.”
Responsibility questions
As the TSA scrambles to meet tight deadlines for installing federal screeners (Nov. 19) and bomb-scanning machines (Dec. 31), which agency has responsibility for what aspects of safety has been thrown into flux.
The TSA will also be creating a national airport police force to provide a law-enforcement presence at passenger and baggage checkpoints.
How that will change the current role of the airport police remains to be seen, although Chief Melville and the TSA's Mr. Burgess say the relationship between screeners and the police is strong, especially with the police now providing backup at the checkpoints.
But airport officials say that they expect many of the trends shown by the response records to continue, no matter who responds, especially when it comes to a heightened awareness by the public, and that willingness to make a call that they may not have made before the attacks.
“Everyone's job in aviation changed with 9/11,” says Mr. Everett.
“But some of these things will be with us for quite awhile.”
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