Milton Ahlerich and NFL Security: Goal-Line Stand

Anything can happen at a football game. But Milton Ahlerich, the NFL's VP of security, has sworn to make it safe for players and fans alike.

In 2003, a similar request was made by San Diego for its Super Bowl. The city received a Level 2 designation from the Homeland Security departmentone step down from the previous year. Command and control remained with the San Diego police and the football league, but the federal government again provided significant resources. As of press time, the governor of Texas has requested a security designation for the Super Bowl in Houston, but no determination has yet been announced.

For Ahlerich, working with the federal agencies is a challengebut a comfortable one. "I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's certainly not foreign to us since most of us are former feds ourselves," says Ahlerich. In addition to Ahlerich's FBI credentials, his chief of special event security is a former Secret Service executive, and his chief of investigations is a former FBI agent.

The greater challenge for him has been the media's insistence on spinning minor security precautions into wild and nefarious stories about the league snooping on its fans. The 2001 Super Bowl was dubbed the Snooperbowl after a story broke that the league used facial recognition technology to scan all the fans' faces, searching out known terrorists and criminals. "I can't tell you how many times I've corrected the record on this," says Ahlerich. In point of fact, he says, the Tampa, Fla., police department installed the system on one walkway that led into the stadium from the NFL Experience (a theme park that runs on the Super Bowl site for a few days before the game). "We pulled the plug on it very quickly, before the Super Bowl," says Ahlerich, because the technology itself was a "miserable failure."

"We did agree to the Tampa police department using it, so I don't want to lay this all off on them, but we didn't bring it to the party," he insists.

Other technologies, however, have yielded some good results. A vehicle-screening technology has been used at a number of stadiums, allowing security to screen for suspicious materials without needing to unload boxes or walk dogs through contents. Ahlerich is rather cryptic about what this technology is, preferring to keep it a trade secret, but he notes that it's a cutting-edge technology that has come to them courtesy of the government, and "it's proving to have a lot of merit." Off-the-Field GoalsThere's an interesting dichotomy to Ahlerich's security program. On the one hand, he deals with huge national events; on the other, he's occupied with the security concerns of individual players and their families. Much of what Ahlerich and his team are trying to do for the players could be termed "preventive" security, but he bristles at the notion that any of the players are simply troublemakers. "There is a great perception that these players are involved in all kinds of awful conduct. That's a very bad rap," says Ahlerich. Of the nearly 1,800 players who are on the team rosters at any given time, only 30 to 40 are arrested per year, he estimates, and far fewer are actually convicted. While Ahlerich is certainly not hanging his hat on a small conviction record, he argues that the number is miniscule compared with people's wild assumptions. "We're not proud of it," he says. "But let's be fair. It ain't 300."