JFK guards were caught dozing on the job. Several John F. Kennedy Airport security guards were caught on camera sleeping on the clock.
The New York Post obtained several photos of employees sleeping at the airport. The photos were provided by former boss Stephen Jackson, 39.
"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 started working at FJC in August 2011 and became supervisor at JDK in December. He was fired at the end of May due to several issues. Jackson claims its because of his Hispanic race and his whistle-blowing.
Jackson supervised between 58 and 65 guards a day over the course of eight hours at the New York airport. He says that he would catch at least six sleeping while working.
One of those guards, Suhas Harite, 68, was caught sleeping twice while assigned to a remote location. This post happens to be 150 yards from a bay where a stranded jet skier climbed the airport fence in august and breached a $100 million security system. He was able to make his way across two runways without being detected until he asked for help.
After that incident, FJC added four posts in that area and hundreds of dollars were spent in police overtime. However that security is useless when the guards are sleeping.
Jackson took a cellphone video of Harite sleeping in March. He can be seen sleeping behind the wheel of a FJC vehicle.
"Come on, buddy. Wake up!" Jackson is heard saying to the man while he honks his down. "Beeping the horn, nothing. A plane's taking off," Jackson says in the video while still honking as a jet is seen and heard in the background.
Jackson claims that he told management about the incident but they didn't move Harite. Jackson photographed Harite sleeping again a few weeks later. The second incident led to Harite being suspended without pay for a week.
Harite wasn't the only guard that Jackson caught dozing off. Jackson says that management didn't want to handle the process of firing and replacing an employee.
"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," Jackson told the Post.
"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.' "
After the Post reached out to the Port Authority, the employees that were caught sleeping were banned from working at PA facilities.
Mike McKeon, an FJC spokesman, claims that Jackson never brought up these issues to management while working for them. He said that he threatened to use it if he was fired.
"He said, 'If you fire me, I'm going to take this to The Post.' I'll give him this: At least he was a man of his word with regards to this," McKeon told the Post.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
