Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday called for airport employees to undergo the same screening procedures as passengers.
The New York lawmaker pushing for the changes cited an incident involving an employee of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport who was arrested for smuggling guns into areas beyond the facility’s security checkpoints last year.
“I was shocked and appalled — we’ve talked about it on the phone — by the gun-smuggling ring that operated out of Atlanta, Georgia, in which criminals routinely abused loopholes in the TSA system to bring loaded weapons right onto airplanes,” Schumer told Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson, whose agency oversees the TSA.
{mosads}”Wouldn’t it make sense that wherever it’s feasible in some airports, it may not be, that whenever possible these employees go through a screening the way the pilots do and the flight attendants do,” Schumer continued.
Johnson said he was also upset at the Atlanta gun incident, but he said it is not feasible to screen all of a major airport’s employees individually.
“Senator, you said you appreciated my candor at these hearings. So I have made a public fact of the record number of firearms seized by TSA last year,” Johnson said. “So at screening points in carry-on luggage, you can imagine my reaction when I found out that somebody’s bringing loaded weapons into the overhead compartments of commercial airplanes.”
Johnson said he ordered the TSA “to work with the airline industry and to work with airport security authorities to tighten up our system.”
“Our Advisory Committee came back with some recommendations,” he said. “I have endorsed them. They include random continuous, unpredictable screening of airline and airport security and airport employees at the sterile checkpoints.
“If an airline or airport employee is going to fly, they have to go through the TSA checkpoint,” Johnson continued. “Continuous back criminal history, background checks and reducing the number of access points. There were a number of recommendations made that I have embraced. Those are, in my judgment, the big four.”
Johnson said requiring all airport employees to be screened in the same matter as passengers when they arrive for work would impose “a one-size-fits-all approach to every airport in this country.”
“Atlanta is not Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “There are 63,000 employees at the Maynard Jackson Airport in Atlanta. That’s a small city.
“And so I think that appropriate balanced way to go is random, unpredictable, continuous screening of employees when they show up,” he added. “The way it works in Atlanta is there’s a guard house at the parking lot and you show an ID, and then you drive on through.”