Cabbies protest airport ID requirement

A controversy over a new requirement for cab drivers picking up passengers at Houston airports led cabbies to protest at City Hall yesterday, calling for "justice" and claiming that their constitutional rights have been abridged. At issue is a requirement from the city's Aviation Department that cabbies wear photo identification badges when picking people up at Bush Intercontinental and Hobby airports — a measure airport authorities say is necessary to ensure security. "Whether you work for the city or work for an airline or a contractor, you do business with the city, we would want everyone that comes into contact with passengers and others to have background checks done and a security badge," the Aviation Department's Mark Mancuso told KHOU. Fair enough, right?

Wrong, say some cab drivers and the increasingly present Deric Muhammad of the Millions More Movement Ministry of Justice, which is helping represent the drivers. "It violates the constitutional rights of the cab drivers in that in enacts a very, very strenuous background check," Muhammad said. "Many of them are being put out of business and not being allowed to work at the airport system for something they may have done in the past." Independent cab driver Tommy Breedlove echoed that sentiment, telling Channel 11 that the background checks are too extensive: "We don't feel that it's fair to take someone's background that far back and turn around and put them out of business."

The problem, cab drivers say, is that the city could take away their access to the airports — a prime source of revenue. But the Aviation Department says the drivers are misunderstanding the requirement for the background checks, which aren't any different from those required for other folks working in and around the airports. "We believe that security is something everyone needs to be focused on in this day and age," Mancuso told the Chronicle.