LAX police union urges full-body scanning of all passengers

The head of the Los Angeles airport police union this morning urged the federal government to require full-body scanners for every passenger at airport security checkpoints, saying metal detectors are no longer enough.

Marshall McClain, president of the Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Assn., issued a statement saying the Christmas Day incident in which a Nigerian man boarded a Detroit-bound Northwest flight with explosives showed that current screening methods cannot detect devices with little or no metal.

“All available technology and tools must be used to fix an obvious gap in security that puts airline travelers and crew members at risk,” McClain said in the statement. “Testing of whole-body scanners at LAX has shown them to be highly effective in keeping dangerous materials off airplanes.”

Los Angeles is currently one of 19 airports nationwide that uses whole-body imagers, but only uses it on passengers selected for secondary screening, according to McClain. He urged that the screening be expanded to all passengers.

-- Victoria Kim

Photo: A Transportation Security Administration employee demonstrates the Rapiscan Backscatter advanced imaging technology machine in testing at the TSA Systems Integration Facility in Arlington, Va. Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg

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Comments

[Edward]

There is no gap in HOW people are screened, the problem is WHO exactly we are screening. So every single person (80-yr-old grandmothers? toddlers?) should be screened using full-body scanning? People with gov't clearance? Airline pilots? How about, for good measure, we drag homeless people off the streets and screen them too?

Why are average Americans being super-screened, and Nigerians with bomb-laden underwear allowed on board jets? This is getting tired, and we need to expect more from the TSA than its current paranoid, reactive security measures.

[Tom]

What is the potential for radiation damage as a result of repeated full body scans? How much time would this take? Would we be required to sleep over in the airport overnight, prior to our departure, in order to clear scanning in time to make our flights?
Would the LAAPOA be willing to pony up the money to buy these detectors?

[sal]

the LAX police union, LAPD union, Sheriff's union should be urging the federal government to do away with the TSA. Let real law enforment folks do this job.

[Derrick]

Oh please, there is one reason, and one reason only that the LAX police union is encouraging the use of full-body scanners, and that is that it will mean more union police officers which will make the union stronger and more powerful. The last thing that we need is another powerful lobby.

[JohnB]

While whole body scanners can help it can also lull those into a false sense of security. It is just one piece of a security puzzle. Whole body scanners would NOT have prevented the potential bomber from bringing the PET material embedded in his underwear according to many security experts.

[Welcome to the Police State]

Virtual strip searches for everyone! This is so ridiculous.

[Jim]

Here we go again - shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.

This is the style of thinking that gives complete victory to the terrorists. No innovation just knee jerk reaction.

Take a deep breath and realise you are not safe and never will be. You will die when the fates decree it and not before.

[Carol]

No fly lists, domestic and international security agencies talking to each other, comparing information, this is how terrorists will be kept off planes. Agencies can't be so full of themselves that they refuse to start working better with other agencies.

This is especially so since "data" is the current buzzword. For the last 2-3 years, we've been collecting school test data, hospital data, Bill Bratton expanded the use of data in the LAPD. Shouldn't security agencies be using all this data to find patterns, predict outcomes?

[fed up citizen]

This is outrageous, a reliance on degrading technology and more cops, a police state without dignity, playing into the hands of the terrorists. It IS "shutting the barn door after the cows have left," like someone else says here.

Narrowly reacting to the LAST idiot, like forbidding us from using the toilet or having a blanket for the last hour, on top of forbidding us from bringing water onboard however hot it gets 3 years ago (human rights violations now, this treatment would be literally illegal for ANIMALS).

The fact is the Nigerian SHOULD HAVE BEEN STOPPED before he boarded by being on a LIST - his own father went to the US Embassy for pete's sake, to warn his son was dangerous. You don't do that against your own son in an America-hating Muslim country unless you really mean it! There were OTHER "bits and pieces" of info about him in the hands of various "intelligence" agencies that were never coordinated. THAT is the problem.

The TSA needs to carefully adhere to the list, pull aside those on it for extra questioning, SELECTIVELY BASED ON LOGICAL CRITERIA NOT RANDOM. Like they do in Israel - but there they do it for everyone; here, with so many more passengers, we need to be selective. ENOUGH OF THIS P. C. GARBAGE WHICH LETS MUSLIMS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES GO THROUGH WITHOUT QUESTION WHILE CITIZENS WITHOUT A SINGLE BLOG ON THEIR RECORDS ARE HUMILIATED TO NO PURPOSE.

Degrading pat-downs of women, old ladies, tiny children, my dad with Alzheimer's had to undergo it and was made to remove a belt, as if flying wasn't horrible, degrading and illogical enough.

[Jage]

I'd feel safer with American-Passport-Holding-Passengers-Only Flights.

Perhaps the airlines would let other flyers know when individuals from suspect countries are sharing their flight?

This is no longer a post WWII world...it is a terrorist world,
and being un-politically correct just might save lives!

[patriot2010]

These scanners would not detect items (explosives, matches,etc) that someone had ingested. That person could simply take laxatives once onboard to 'retrieve' the material. This is how convicts sneak contraband into prisons.

Since people under the age of 18 are not required to go through the body scanners, what's stopping the terrorists from using kids to bring bomb making materials onboard?

It seems like the more incompetent/irresponsible government workers, the fewer rights we are allowed to keep. Law enforcement received intelligence that Al Qaeda operatives were planning on using commercial airliners to attack the US. The government did nothing, thousands of people died and now the rest of us have to go through more stringent security screening. The same thing happened with the Nigerian bomber. His own father reported him to the US embassy, the government did nothing, no one died (luckily) and now we are all forced to go through virtual strip searches.

How many government workers have been fired over the Nigerian bomber incident? Zero

How many law abiding citizens are being forced to comply with virtual strip searches? Millions

[Brian]

So now instead of the risk of someone blowing up a plane, killing only those on that particular plane, everyone that flies must now expose themselves to having there DNA being damaged, putting ALL at risk of getting cancer. This does not make one bit of sense, but then again there is something else here that is going on. It's really not about preventing terrorist from boarding a plane. It about slowly setting up a new form of fascist dictatorship where all the citizens of the world are controlled and watched, poised, have the population reduced, but all under the guise of protecting the people from the terrorist….well, I guess we have to go through this all over again…….what must be will be because ultimately they all crumble and fall, just like Hitler, Mussolini, Charlemagne and other with grand schemes, ideas of world domination they eventually crumble and fall.

[Jo]

I find this absolutely appalling. As a military family, we have to fly more often than we'd like too, and most often it's me alone with our two small children while my husband flies by himself. How on earth am I supposed to get a four year old with autism and a one year old to sit perfectly still for their strip scans? And where exactly am I to put the children while letting some stranger virtually strip search me? As a rape victim, I am disgusted that I will have to be subjected to yet another violation. As a military family, I'm without words that my husband can die for this country, but I can't take a flight to see him with our children without the whole lot of us being violated. This is insane!