JFK Airport Guards Caught Dozing On The Job; Napping Officers Banned From PANYNJ Facilities

Security guards sleeping on the job at John F. Kennedy International Airport is not an unusual sight, a former security supervisor told the New York Post.

Stephen Jackson, 39, said this happens despite the airport being high on the target list of terrorist attacks, and he has provided the Post with photographs of security personnel dozing off on the job.

“It was a regular occurrence finding the guards sleeping,” Jackson, a former manager for FJC Security, which employs about 300 security guards at JFK airport, told the Post.

Jackson became the security guard supervisor at the airport in December but lost his job in May, which he claims was because of a “campaign of harassment” against his Hispanic background and his whistle-blowing activities.

Jackson said that the management was not happy that he kept pointing out the lax security at the airport, and they were not open to firing these napping guards.

“If you fire someone, you have to do paperwork, hire someone new and place others on overtime until you can find somebody else, so a lot of managers wouldn’t want that placed on their shoulders,” he said.

“I’d be told, ‘Jackson, why do you have to make more work for us by exposing these people for sleeping? You should just wake them up and give them warnings.’”

According to the Post, FJC guards draw starting salaries of $17.23 an hour with benefits. This amounts to an annual salary of $36,000 or about $6,000 less than the annual starting salary of an NYPD cop.

Security guards who were exposed sleeping on the job through photographs furnished by Jackson to the Post have since been banned from working at facilities under the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.

A security failure at JFK airport had earlier resulted in a stranded jet skier breaching the airport’s $100 million security system, and walking undetected across two runways and into a terminal before an airport official alerted security personnel, the Post reported.