Putting Some Sensitivity Into Herding the Holiday Masses : Travel: LAX security officials have been undergoing cultural training to cope with the mass of foreign and domestic passengers expected during the holidays.

Gucci bags to the left, Minoltas to the right, through the sliding glass doors stream the 675,000.

Herding the traveling masses through the maze of the Los Angeles International Airport this Thanksgiving week will be the appointed duty of 300 airport police and security officials who must negotiate high-stress curves and brave an onslaught of mind-numbing questions.

When the human wave hits, airport police say, there’s little time for niceties or for understanding the difficulties foreign travelers face when confronting LAX. They’re just trying to load passengers onto planes and deal with the “lost, late and lonely” that fill one of the world’s busiest airports.

That is one of the key reasons the airport police are undergoing sensitivity training to aid them in their dealings with tens of millions of visitors each year. Law enforcement officials at LAX are now required to take 24 hours of so-called “cultural diversity awareness” workshops to help them interact better with foreign and domestic travelers.

“We’re trying to sensitize them to the fact that the airport is a comfortable environment for them because it’s their workplace,” workshop trainer Ann Akiko Kusumoto said. “But for everybody else, it’s a zoo.”

Thanksgiving week is traditionally one of the busiest times of the year at the airport, with 675,000 travelers expected over a five-day period. By year’s end, airport officials estimate, 45 million people will have visited LAX, including about 10 million international flight passengers.

“During prime-time hours you may have 8,000 people who are trying to get their bags checked, get ticketed, and get on an airplane with little time to spare,” Officer Brent Barton said. “That’s why it seems often that planes are like cattle cars. You just have to push a lot of people through the terminals. And the people just line up waiting to ask us questions.”

Realizing the potential problems, airport officials launched the program last year to help police overcome stereotyping and cultural barriers. Similar training programs were later suggested for the Los Angeles Police Department by the Christopher Commission, the panel that investigated the videotaped beating of Rodney King by police officers.

Organized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the three, eight-hour workshops are conducted by interracial teams that include at least one woman and one former law enforcement officer.

The sessions involve group discussions and role playing, where law enforcement officers must act out scenarios they might encounter with foreign-born, non-English-speaking travelers. During a workshop at the Airport Hyatt last week, one officer was asked to mediate a dispute between an Ethiopian immigrant and a Vietnamese immigrant over a fender-bender. Another involved an Asian woman who had difficulty using the telephone but refused any help from police.

“If you have a uniform on, you are going to get all of the questions and all of the challenges,” Ivory Webb, a former Compton police chief, told a group of 30 officers during the workshop. “To people at the airport you are 911 and 411. That’s your job.”

Webb, who is serving as one of the project coordinators, said one of the problems airport police face is that they must handle typical law enforcement problems as well as other difficulties not usually faced by municipal police officers.

Airport officers say they encounter situations where people trying to catch their planes will abandon their rental cars at the curb--choosing to pay a hefty towing fine rather than miss their flights. Barton said one man actually thanked him for taking care of his car after he told the anxious driver that the vehicle would be impounded.

“Theirs is much more of a serving concept,” Webb said. “They have to provide helpful services to a traveling public, and that’s not a traditional police role. That’s why it’s even more important that they improve their communication skills and recognize the diversity of the people they deal with.”

Airport police and security officers have mixed reactions to the program. Some believe the workshops are extremely helpful. Others say that they’re just designed to improve the image of airport police without actually providing any additional technical training.

“What you can see is that there has been a lot of resistance (by officers) to put themselves in another person’s shoes,” said Monica Bauer, an airport crime analyst. “I think programs like these are extremely necessary.”

Countered airport police Lt. Richard Ellis: “Many of the officers feel that we’re not the ones who need this type of training because we deal with this every day. I think it is designed primarily to help management’s goal to improve the department’s image. But if we happen to pick up some good ideas along the way, that’s all the better.”

Kusumoto, a human resources consultant, said that even though metropolitan cities such as New York and Los Angeles are ethnically diverse, typical police training focuses on treating people as if they were all the same. Compounding the problem, she said, is the number of people that the security people encounter each day.

“As stressful as the corporate environment is, it’s nothing like what these people have to deal with,” she said. “LAX is like a three-ring circus. They’re dealing with people in an extremely intimidating environment who are often upset and usually uncomfortable. And with so many people from so many cultures to deal with, it’s a challenge, to say the least.”