Features
‘Gambling’ With Olympics Security
The Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, open Aug. 5, ready or not, and in addition to questions about general preparedness of venues, housing and water quality, the biggest challenge of all – security.
Photo: AP Photo / Felipe Dana, File
Tickets to the 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro recently became available for the cheap as organizers opened up the local ticketing site to the public.
Brazilian police arrested 12 “ISIS inspired” individuals just two weeks before the opening, suspected of plotting acts of terrorism during the Olympics. Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, the federal government didn’t award a private security contract until July 1.
According to the paper, security for previous Games has generally been in place a year in advance. Now, in the rush to hire some 7,000 people to screen for weapons and perform pat-downs, no previous security experience was required.
The contract for staffing of X-ray machines and other screeners went to a small Brazilian temp agency, Artel Recursos Humanos, which reportedly has no experience staffing weapons screeners for large events. The Journal reports screener jobs will pay as little as $9.50 per day and, as of July 23, only about 1,500 had been hired.
A source told the paper the hiring process was “a mess.” New hires who spoke to the Journal describe a process of minimal requirements for the jobs, little instruction other than where to report, and no supervisors present when they did report. Applicants reportedly were required to be high-school graduates, pass medical and background checks, and score at least 70 percent on a 20-question, multiple-choice online security exam in one of three allowed attempts.
No previous security experience was necessary. “How are you going to do this [job] if you don’t have any practical training?” one new screener, a former IT worker, told the Journal. “If I had to search someone, and they had a weapon or a bomb, then what? I wouldn’t know what to do.”
A spokesman for Brazil’s Secretariat for the Security of Large Events that awarded the contracts told the paper the screeners “would be overseen by veteran police and prison guards working with them.”
Security experts aren’t impressed. Colin Clarke, a specialist in terrorism and transnational crime at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., told the Journal that tendering a contract to such an untested temp firm at the last moment is gambling with public safety. “You want guys that are trained in identifying suspicious behavior, picking up patterns, similar to what you have at airports,” he said.