The Transportation Security Administration should be screening its own screeners to weed out thieves who rip off passengers’ expensive electronics, Sen. Charles Schumer said yesterday.
In a letter yesterday to TSA Administrator John Pistole obtained by The Post, the New York Democrat suggests assigning trusted agents to pose as absent-minded travelers who would fail to notice that their pricey toys had vanished after security checks.
But the bait — including iPads, iPhones, laptops and game consoles — would contain GPS chips so that the devices could be tracked. Schumer said he was angered by constituents’ complaints and “recent news reports involving rampant theft of passenger property by TSA agents.”
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His office said that between May 2003 and December 2011, 381 TSA agents were terminated for theft.
The senator’s staffers quoted Federal Aviation Administration figures saying that in 2011, it received reports of missing items from 206 people.
There are no figures available about how much money the missing items were worth.
The agency — with an annual budget of more than $8 billion and more than 54,000 employees — was embarrassed last month by an ABC News report about a sting, similar to the one suggested by Schumer, in which the reporter purposely “lost” an iPad at Orlando Airport.
The station tracked it to the home of a TSA screener, who blamed his wife, saying she had been at the airport and had taken it.
The agency fired him the next day.
It told ABC that 11 of its officers had been fired for theft within the last year.
But it claimed the allegations of employee thievery were being overblown.
The fired workers “represent less than one-half of one percent of officers that have been employed,” the agency told ABC.
Schumer agreed that “the vast majority of TSA agents are hard-working and decent law-abiding citizens.”
But he still wants Pistole to do more to catch the “bad actors” responsible for swiping hundreds of items from passengers’ checked luggage and carry-on baggage.
He noted that in addition to catching crooks, stings would also reduce crime. Screeners would be less likely to steal if they have to worry that the fancy iPhone that had caught their eye had been planted and was traceable.
And the senator had another proposal for Pistole — one with an entertaining element of poetic justice.
He wants Pistole’s screeners — who regularly subject millions of Americans to often intrusive body scans or pat-downs — to undergo random, end-of-shift screenings to ensure that they’re not walking off with passengers’ property.
“Ensuring the safety of travelers through a professional workforce is of the highest priority for TSA. TSA takes allegations of misconduct seriously and will take appropriate corrective action as warranted,” said TSA spokesman David Castelveter.
The TSA maintains that its employees are honest, hardworking people, many of them veterans, reservists and former law-enforcement professionals and that their organization works proactively with local law enforcement to prosecute misconduct.