Towards unpredictability in airport security

Signe Maria Ghelfi-Waechter, Angela Bearth, Carla Sophie Fumagalli and Franziska Hofer
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Signe Maria Ghelfi-Waechter: Senior Researcher in the Research and Development Group, Zurich State Police — Airport Division/Research and Development, Switzerland
Franziska Hofer: Founding Member of the Research and Development Group, Zurich State Police — Airport Division/Research and Development, Switzerland

Journal of Airport Management, 2019, vol. 13, issue 2, 110-121

Abstract: An important responsibility of airport security is to make passengers feel safe during their travel and give airport staff the feeling of a secure work environment. Recently, the concept of unpredictability, originating in the social sciences, is discussed as prevention against insider threats. The assumption is that by being less predictable about where, how and what type of security measures are applied, airport security is improved. Thus, this study was particularly interested in how airport employees perceive unpredictability after experiencing an unannounced security control. This was investigated in a longitudinal online survey with an experimental group and a control group. The findings suggest that the current police strategy is indeed unpredictable and that the deterrence effect of this unpredictability sustains at least one month. Thus, unpredictability appears to be useful and has the potential of replacing current strategies within airport security. There is, however, a lack of scientific research, and several open questions make its use vulnerable and not (yet) reliable enough to be applied in a systematic way. For example, it is not yet known how unpredictability influences human decision making and actual behaviour. Further, it has not yet been analysed how effective such measures in fact are — for example, how the detection performance is or whether they can substitute for other security measures. This stresses the need for more research to gain further empirical evidence on the effectiveness of unpredictability and the related implications for airport security.

Keywords: unpredictability; airport security; decision making under uncertainty; deterrence; security controls; policing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M1 M10 R4 R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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