Profiling Passengers by Actions, Not Ethnicity
Security teams at airports are taught to watch passenger mood, not skin color.
MIAMI, Jan. 8, 2010— -- Miami Dade Police Officer Gene Lopez opens each PowerPoint session the same way: showing images of a bus exploding.
For a second he walks through the slow motion shot, the projected fireball blossoming in reds and yellows on his chest.
As the bus' roof hurtles slowly over the crown of his balding head, Lopez, one of two officers who train 35,000 airport employees in behavior pattern recognition techniques, tells his students, "Since our bodies are 75 percent water, when that shockwave hits our body it will turn our internal organs into a gelatin or a mush."
All rustling in the class stops. And so another "Advanced Security Awareness" session begins.
The "students" in this class are all badged employees at Miami International Airport, a mechanic, a carpet cleaner, a baggage handler, a pilot, among others.
They are here just above the bustling American Airlines concourse to learn how terrorists act, what might happen if they, in fact, get a chance to act. But chiefly, this group – thinned out significantly today by frigid (for Florida) weather – is here to learn how to detect them.
Lopez says suspected bombers "are going to act differently because their stress level is going to be higher than the normal people you'd expect to see in an airport." They might wear heavy clothing on a summer's day, have a million-mile stare, or seem in a daze or incoherent.
Airports across the country deploy behavior recognition teams that chat with suspicious passengers to ascertain their intentions – folks wearing bulky clothes, people who are sweating, glancing around furtively, staring at security officials etc.. – but Miami International Airport is the only one in the country endeavoring to train all of its staff, not just the passenger screeners.
Rafi Ron, who had headed security at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport before being hired by Boston's Logan Airport in the weeks after 9/11, designed the program, and more intense programs geared toward security personnel at airports in San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, Houston and others. He says, "The only common denominator of a terrorist attack, is that they are carried out by people."
