Rushing to Exploit Security Incidents

Why do agency bureaucrats with an agenda jump at the chance to offer it as a perfect solution to problems they cannot solve? Why, moreover, does the media rise to this bait like a healthy salmon swimming to the home waters? One need only look to this week’s story of an FPS guard’s actions in Detroit for a recent case in point. The sensational parts of the story surfaced in the usual news outlets, (including http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/active-bomb-sat-detroits-mcnamara-federal-building-weeks/story?id=13202135&page=2 ) with headlines like, “Bomb sat in Detroit’s McNamara Federal Building: Guard discovered bomb, then set it aside for three weeks.”

Evidently, a contract security guard working for the Federal Protective Service (FPS) – the government arm that provides basic security for federal buildings – found a suspicious bag. Then, instead of treating it as potentially dangerous, the guard placed it with lost-and-found items within a federal building housing FBI and other government employees. Three weeks later, it appears the same guard service being castigated for this mishandling brought attention to the bag, resulting in a bomb squad discovery that it contained explosives and an ultimate tracing of the bag to an individual bearing a grudge against the FBI. These things happen, perhaps more often than they should. As surely as a dog attracts fleas, though, such cases inevitably give rise to proposed solutions that bear little logical connection to solving the problem. Thus, FPS officials would “like to see fewer contract guards and more career FPS guards,” as though a change of uniform and paycheck issuer would instantaneously foreclose the possibility of a guard making a mistake. This is absolute nonsense. Guards come from the same employee segment and gene pool, regardless of whether their masters are public or private sector employers. Only you can’t easily fire the public sector guards once they have passed probation. Nor do they necessarily become smarter or more dedicated once they change employers.

Most performance deficiencies on the part of any guard force – whether public or private – trace to one or both of two things: training or supervision. Federalizing the contract guards would not necessarily address the shortcomings. Indeed, the reverse often happens, since government employees typically assume a proprietary right to their jobs and soon begin to concern themselves more with entitlements than responsibilities, particularly if the public system insulates them much more from disciplinary action than what happens to peers in the private sector. In the latter case, the guard contractor typically removes a guard from the given account – if he or she erred but is worth saving. Otherwise, termination is the other frequently exercised option. But what would happen if the same life form were judged at fault yet a federal employee? Progressive discipline, employee assistance, or any other combination of multiple second chances. Rushing to federalize FPS guards isn’t the answer, but that hardly impedes the knee-jerk presentation of this option as a panacea.

-- Nick Catrantzos