Parking garage attendants double as anti-terror agents
SUV was parked illegally on the street, its engine running.
Many parking lot managers across the nation are already keenly aware of the threat and train their employees on what to watch for. Tom Lozich, executive director of corporate security for MGM Mirage, which owns all or part of eleven casino-resorts on the Las Vegas Strip, said all new hires, including parking valets, housekeepers and casino cashiers, are trained to watch for signs of terrorism.
City employees who write parking tickets and operate lots in Boulder, Colorado, will go through the antiterror training. Molly Winter, the city’s parking services director, said: “A lot of this is just developing a sense of personal responsibility about things that just don’t seem right.”
Some parking lot attendants say they are not the best people to identify suspicious activity. Nancy Montanez, an attendant in a Miami parking garage, said she spends most of her time scanning tickets, running credit cards and printing receipts. “It’s a good idea, but it would be kind of difficult because when the cars come here, they’re not here for really long,” she said. “They’re here maybe not even a minute during the period of time that I charge them and they exit.”
Background
Matthew Harwood writes that the training is part of a larger TSA-administered program known as First Observer, run by Alexandria, Virginia-based HMS Company, which won a competitive grant in 2008 worth $15.5 million.
According to the program’s Web site, “‘First Observer’ is a national safety and security program that uses the skills, experiences, and ‘savvy’ of America’s transportation professionals to help protect the critical transportation function that moves the goods and services and people across America.”
The idea is simple. As transportation and parking workers trained under the program do their business across the country, they will keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary that may indicate criminal activity or terrorist precursor behavior. If they see something suspicious, they will call a hot line connected to a 24/7 call center set up by HMS. Incoming information is then routed to an Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), run by critical infrastructure owners and operators that feed information to the federal government.
HMS won the contract after DHS shut down the program’s first iteration known as Highway Watch (.pdf), run by the American Trucking Association, after Congress required the program to undergo competitive bidding.
Harwood notes that the current First Observer program already has ten training modules spanning truck drivers to highway workers, says HMS president Charles Hall. The parking lot attendant and meter maid training module will be the eleventh.
“The point is not to turn parking attendants into government agents,” reports Las Vegas’ KVBC News 3. “Rather, it’s to have them act as eyes and ears for the government. They will be trained to recognize suspicious activity such as cars that have been parked in one place for too long.”
