Miami Airport Employees Are Watching You

    Sept. 6, 2006
    MIA is to become the first airport in the nation where aviation employees, from janitors to senior-level managers, will receive behavior recognition training to spot suspicious people or potential terrorists.

    Source The South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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    Passengers at Miami International Airport soon will be scrutinized by many sets of eyes, beyond federal security officers and police.

    MIA is to become the first airport in the nation where aviation employees, from janitors to senior-level managers, will receive behavior recognition training to spot suspicious people or potential terrorists.

    "Every employee who works around airport goes to the bathroom and goes to lunch, and wherever they are, they're going to be trained to recognize behavior that is suspicious," airport spokesman Greg Chin said Tuesday.

    Initially, about 1,600 Miami-Dade Aviation Department employees will receive four hours of training, starting Thursday. The first class will include 50 to 75 upper level administrators.

    Eventually, the course will be offered to 35,000 airport employees, including those who work for airlines, skycap services and various vendors, Chin said.

    "The aim is to have as many eyes and ears in the airport as possible," he said.

    About 88,000 passengers come and go from Miami International each day.

    Miami-Dade County police officers, and specifically those under the airport's incident containment team, will be the course instructors. Those officers already have been trained by New Age Security Solutions of Washington, D.C., Chin said.

    Rafi Ron, president of that firm, is the former security director for Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, and pioneered training employees to recognize potentially dangerous behavior.

    "This is not profiling," said airport spokesman Marc Henderson. "You're looking for patterns that would be out of the ordinary."

    The airport is undertaking the training program without prompting from the Transportation Security Administration, said Lauren Stover, MIA's Assistant Aviation Director of Security and Communications.

    "It's independent of the TSA," she said. "It was an initiative that the police and I wanted to move forward on as an additional layer of security."

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