"Above the Rules: MSP official bypasses checkpoint to catch flight to Mexico"

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Airports official skips through security to catch plane to Mexico 
By Robert Franklin
The Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune 


This much is not in dispute: Airport commission official Juan Lopez went
through airport security three weeks ago, put his wife on a plane and
returned to a nonsecure area.

Then, running late, he used his employee badge to skip a security check to
catch his own flight to Mexico.

"The badge can only be used for the performance of your job, and it cannot
be used for anybody who is flying" to duck security, said Patrick Hogan,
spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which moved to suspend
Lopez's badge privileges. "This is considered a serious violation."

Lopez, MAC's diversity manager, said Monday that what he did was "a rules
violation, but it is an honest mistake. I made the assumption that, because
I am an employee and because I had access, I could use it."

Lopez, who has been with the MAC for a decade, said he used a badge he has
had since December to go through a door into the secure area.

"I am aware of the importance of security," he said. "I'm kind of the
rules-following type of guy."

Hogan said someone saw Lopez get on a plane to Cancun and asked airport
police to check him out. Lopez was interviewed, and he and his bags
underwent a security check in the boarding gate area, then he caught his
flight.

Lopez was charged under an airport ordinance prohibiting any act that
seriously endangers property or people or poses a serious threat to
security, Hogan said. If an airport hearing officer finds him guilty, he
could lose badge privileges for two years, Hogan said.

That also could cost Lopez his job if he needs his badge to get into secure
areas on a regular basis. But Lopez said he does almost all his work out of
MAC's headquarters office away from the terminal.

Hogan said he is aware of fewer than a half-dozen such cases in the past
decade. A Northwest Airlines employee was fired for a similar offense a year
or so ago, he said.

The commission's latest statistics show 335 security violations in 2003,
some for lesser infractions such as holding a door open for a co-worker to
follow through without swiping his or her own badge in a card reader, Hogan
said. "The vast majority were not [for] getting on an airplane without
security."

All commission, airline and concession workers who wear badges undergo
background checks and fingerprinting, so Lopez is "not an unknown quantity,"
he said. "Still, federal law says he has to be screened before he gets on a
plane."


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