Cuts hobble Federal Protective Service
By TIM KAUFFMAN
Federal Times
February 18, 2008
When Congress agreed in November 2002 to move the Federal Protective Service to the newly created Homeland Security Department, the goals were laudable: to improve the protection of employees and visitors at 8,800 federal buildings nationwide and raise the stature of police officers and inspectors at the agency.
Instead, the results have been alarming.
The agency has been underfunded since moving from the General Services Administration five years ago next month. Broken equipment such as cameras, metal detectors and radios haven’t been repaired. Quit rates have skyrocketed, particularly among police officers who are the first line of defense against criminal or terrorist acts at federal workplaces.
“It’s mind-boggling how you can go from a law enforcement agency managed by realty professionals into the Department of Homeland Security, which you would think would be the solution, and we’re faced with yet larger problems,” said David Wright, an inspector stationed in Kansas City, Mo., who heads the American Federation of Government Employees union representing FPS employees.
In a preliminary report on the agency, the Government Accountability Office described an agency unable to perform its mission:
— At one vacant federal building that was not identified, a dead homeless man went undetected for three months until a GSA official went into the building with a prospective buyer. Names and locations of this and other buildings cited in the report where security lapses were found were not identified for security reasons.
— A large federal building under the highest level of security saw its FPS security force dwindle from six to zero.
— At one region visited by GAO, contract guards at about 70 buildings had been unsupervised for six months since the FPS inspector responsible for those buildings had retired.
— At another large federal building requiring the highest security, only 11 of 150 security cameras were fully functional.
FPS Director Gary Schenkel does not dispute the GAO findings, and says the answer is to integrate what has essentially been two separate functions within the agency: patrolling and responding to crimes within buildings, and assessing each building’s security threat to determine what countermeasures are needed.
This effort, which Schenkel launched soon after arriving last March, aims to ultimately phase out FPS police officers in favor of inspectors who can perform both the security assessment and law enforcement functions.
“Every inspector is a certified sworn law enforcement officer, plus they have additional expertise and certification to truly look at that integrated security program,” Schenkel said.
Prior to this job, Schenkel served as assistant federal security director for the Transportation Security Administration at Chicago Midway Airport. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, Schenkel said he would like all of FPS’ 215 police officers to convert to inspectors, although he realizes there are some “hardcore police officers” who won’t switch. They won’t be forced out. The agency converted about 40 police officers to inspectors last year and intends to convert another 75 this year, he said.
The move worries some people inside and outside the agency who believe the agency should have dedicated police officers actively patrolling buildings and responding to incidents.
Except in a few locations, FPS no longer patrols inside and outside of federal buildings to detect and prevent criminal incidents and terrorism-related activities, GAO said. Instead, they mostly respond to security incidents. In addition, FPS regional offices have reduced their hours of operation in many locations, resulting in a lack of coverage when most federal employees are either entering or leaving federal buildings.
Officers told GAO the reduction in police presence has had negative consequences, such as leaving federal day care facilities vulnerable to loitering by homeless individuals and drug users, increasing the time it takes for FPS to respond to incidents from a few hours to a couple of days, and placing FPS officers and inspectors in greater danger because they lack the manpower required for backup.
Reliance on local law enforcement
FPS intends to cover gaps in building security by relying on local law enforcement. However, FPS acknowledged to GAO that it has not signed any agreements with local law enforcement agencies to provide such security. Nor has it resolved jurisdictional barriers that prohibit local police from responding to incidents at federal facilities.
Schenkel told Federal Times there are no jurisdictional issues and local law enforcement agencies can respond to incidents at nearly all federal buildings under FPS’ primary control.
But expecting local law enforcement agencies to take on the additional duties of patrolling federal facilities and responding to incidents there without providing them additional funding is “misguided,” said Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, a lobbying organization in Alexandria, Va., that represents 238,000 officers nationwide.
“The state law enforcement officers and certainly the local and municipal officers have got their hands full as it is. To ask them or just kind of assume that the officers who are already working for counties or municipalities are going to be able to just take on this additional burden, off the shoulders of the federal government, is a little naïve,” Johnson said.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local police departments have been taking on more duties — such as border security, infrastructure protection, illegal immigration enforcement and anti-terrorism — that were previously the domain of federal law enforcement. At the same time, they’re getting substantially less money from the federal government. For instance, Justice Department grants to local law enforcement agencies have declined 40 percent since 2002.
As a result, police departments in many large cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Detroit — have cut their forces by several thousand each in the last few years.
“Most people don’t realize it, but New York City has thousands of fewer officers today than it did on 9/11,” Johnson said.
An FPS inspector in the Washington office who asked not to be identified said morale in the agency has steadily worsened since Schenkel was brought on board. Schenkel, who has no prior uniformed police experience, replaced Wendell Shingler, a former cop and security chief at the Marshals Service. Although many problems at the agency occurred under Shingler’s watch, he had earned respect among employees for trying to enhance the agency’s police officer function.
“The folks they’ve hired aren’t into law enforcement. They’re all into information gathering,” the inspector said.
Misplaced, poorly funded
FPS didn’t fit well within its previous parent agency. GSA is predominantly a procurement and real estate management agency. But the agency is equally ostracized within Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, where the primary mission is to enforce immigration laws, Wright said.
The initial rationale was that FPS would fit well with other law enforcement organizations within ICE, but Wright said it’s become a head-scratcher for most people.
“That is the first question I get from every congressional staffer and every reporter I talk to,” he said. “We are basically low man on the totem pole. The agency is run by legacy immigration and customs enforcement officers who have zero regard for the FPS mission. I think we would be much more at home in a section of DHS such as [the Office of] Infrastructure Protection.”
Schenkel concedes the pairing seems odd, but said it has proved useful in several ways. FPS’ back-office functions, including financing and acquisition, have been integrated into ICE’s system. And FPS officers have arrested a steady number of illegal immigrants who have entered federal facilities.
Wright said the agency also needs a dedicated funding source. FPS’ income comes from service fees charged to agencies through rent assessed by GSA. But that revenue is not covering the bills for FPS. The agency had budget shortfalls of $70 million in fiscal 2005 and $57 million in fiscal 2006, causing it to institute a variety of cost-saving measures such as restricting hiring and travel, limiting training and overtime, forgoing the purchase of new radios and canceling employee performance awards.
The agency this year raised its basic security fee 46 percent, to 57 cents per square foot, and plans another one-cent hike in 2009.
FPS told GAO that its cost-cutting measures have hurt the agency by depressing employee morale, increasing attrition and making it harder to attract new employees.
Schenkel told Federal Times the agency has made some headway in resolving its financial problems. Last summer, the agency eradicated a backlog of 2,200 past due invoices — totaling $92 million — for contract guard services that dated back to 1999.
“We were losing money, and as we are a fee-for-service [agency], that money that we were paying in interest equated to things that we couldn’t do, like give our officers new equipment, provide training, give awards,” he said.
Last year was the first year since 2004 that the agency paid its employees annual performance awards and was the first year since moving to Homeland Security that the agency had no budget shortfall.
Attrition is down from what GAO reported, and the agency plans to hire 20 to 25 new inspectors by the end of September, he said.
Still, Schenkel said the agency has a long way to go to restore some of the damage done to employee morale.
“I always make a naval analogy. It takes 38 miles to turn an aircraft carrier at sea. I’m not trying to paint a perfect picture because we’ve got a long, long way to go, but we’re two miles into that 38-mile turn. The good news is we’re two miles in, because last year we hadn’t even initiated the turn,” he said.
Judiciary wants new guards
But the turnaround at FPS appears to be taking too long for FPS’ biggest customer: the federal courts.
Last March, the Judicial Conference said it had “serious concerns” about FPS’ ability to provide perimeter security at federal courthouses and voted to support legislative efforts to make the Justice Department’s Marshals Service responsible for security. The Marshals Service currently provides security inside federal courthouses, while FPS is responsible for posting guards outside courthouses and maintaining security cameras that survey courthouse grounds.
In the fiscal 2008 appropriations bill, Congress authorized the Marshals Service to assume perimeter security functions at five courthouses under a test case. Courts spokeswoman Karen Redmond said the program will be rolled out between May and September at courthouses that have yet to be determined. The program is expected to last between 12 and 18 months and, if successful, could result in the Marshals Service taking over for FPS at all courthouses.
