As Los Angeles prepares to welcome world visitors for the FIFA World Cup next year and the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) isn’t ready.
The airport has spectacularly fallen from grace. In the last few years, LAX has been downgraded from the third busiest airport in the world to the 15th. While America has seen a post-pandemic resurgence, LAX has not. In 2019, more than 88 million passengers traveled through LAX. In 2023, just over 75 million.
But as the World Cup and the Olympics bring prestige and attention to L.A., passenger levels will not be LAX’s problem. Preparedness, safety and ensuring an orderly airport environment will be. Again, LAX isn’t ready.
The issue is leadership, vision and priorities — all of which are lacking in the new CEO.
Los Angeles Airport Police (LAXPD), LAX’s proprietary police department that oversees all aspects of LAX safety, is substantially understaffed. Like many departments, LAXPD lost officers during and after COVID, but it suffered more than most.
John Ackerman, CEO of Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), has not followed the example of others who have taken creative steps to retain and recruit officers — instead, he has done the opposite.
Ackerman came from Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), where he was executive vice president of global strategy and development. In that role, he was known for increasing cargo and developing data and analytics. DFW is not known for its safety record — particularly due to its airport shootings — and Dallas–Fort Worth is no city of L.A. when it comes to its complex crime history. This is the big time.
When millions of sports fans come through LAX for the exciting, once-in-a-lifetime experiences of the World Cup and the Olympics, no amount of cargo, data or analytics will be able to set the stage for or de-escalate the best-case scenarios of overexuberant crowds and, worst case, nefarious actors that high-profile events like these attract.
Ackerman is currently playing a shell game, trying to move airport police out of key safety roles at the airport and replace them with civilians. He does not understand that those positions require sworn officers to keep the entire safety and policing environment at LAX secure, running smoothly and actively countering insider threats. To force this change, if the police bargaining unit refuses to agree to contracting out these critical sworn positions to civilian employees, Ackerman is threatening to change the workday/week schedule of sworn officers — a major, destabilizing intimidation tactic that only further erodes morale in a police force already working hard to remain cohesive.
Furthermore, LAXPD exclusively accepts recruits from the LAPD Academy, which is substantially limited by its class sizes and unable to provide LAXPD with an adequate number of recruits to replace retirees and fill new positions. Instead of expanding access to Rio Hondo and Los Angeles Sheriff’s academies, Ackerman remains stuck. In being stuck, he is not serving his airport and all its needs. Cargo is good. Data is good. But being the CEO — not executive vice president — of LAX means prioritizing safety and having a police department that is fully staffed and ready for today and certainly for tomorrow — the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics.
The Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Association (LAAPOA) calls upon LAWA CEO Ackerman to bring in more recruits, stop playing the reallocation-of-policing-jobs game and stop threatening our officers with shift changes to force those reallocations. Being CEO of LAX is a serious job. It’s time to do it right.
“LAAPOA and the officers we have on the ground are ready for what’s to come with the World Cup and the Olympics, but we are understaffed and need to ramp up quickly. We don’t need to strip critical tasks from our officers, civilianize them or threaten current officers with changes to their workweek schedules. Instead, we need to fill vacant posts, bring in more officers to prepare for the world attractions coming to Los Angeles and have new officers ready to go to continue protecting LAX, its passengers, employees and aircraft partners,” LAAPOA President Marshall E. McClain says.
“Importantly, we need to keep the officers we have happy and secure so they do their jobs to the best of their ability and keep our airport safe. We need a leader to put in place these commonsense actions and call upon CEO Ackerman to do so,” McClain continues. “Mayor Karen Bass hired him to do this job — all of it. She has been responsive to LAXPD, and for that, we are appreciative, but she should not have to micromanage her airport CEO to do his job on airport police staffing and retention.”