Erroll Southers
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Erroll G. Southers is an American expert in transportation security and counterterrorism. He is the author of Inside the Castle Walls: An American Journey Through Espionage, Counterterrorism and Government (2026)[1] and Homegrown Violent Extremism (2013).[2] Southers is the Associate Senior Vice President for Safety & Risk Assurance at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Professor of Practice in National and Homeland Security. He is also managing director for counterterrorism & infrastructure protection at TAL Global Corporation. He previously served as the president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, as well as assistant chief of the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) police department's office of homeland security and intelligence.[3] He is a former special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was deputy director of homeland security under California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.[4] In 2009 he was nominated by President Barack Obama to become head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), but Southers withdrew.[5][6]
Southers earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Brown University in 1978, a Master of Public Administration, at University of Southern California in 1998 and a doctorate in policy, planning and development, from the USC Price School of Public Policy, in 2013. Southers' dissertation, "Homegrown Violent Extremism: Designing a Community-Based Model to Reduce the Risk of Recruitment and Radicalization," explored the "morality, leadership and group behavioral constructs capable of supporting a terrorism resistant community model."[7] He is a senior fellow of the UCLA School of Public Affairs[8] and a visiting fellow of the International Institute of Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.
Police career
Southers began his law enforcement career at the Santa Monica Police Department and served as a faculty member of the Rio Hondo police academy. During his four years in the FBI, Southers was assigned to counterterrorism, foreign counterintelligence and was a member of the bureau's SWAT Team. He was the deputy director for critical infrastructure protection of the California Office of Homeland Security (2004–2006), appointed by Schwarzenegger. He provided oversight of critical infrastructure protection policy, national pilot programs such as Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) and served as a member of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) working group, responsible for developing the NIPP.
In 2006, Southers was named associate director of special programs for CREATE, where he developed the university's executive program in counter-terrorism and serves as an adjunct professor of homeland security and public policy in the USC Price School of Public Policy. Recognized as one of the university's counter-terrorism experts[by whom?], he lectures at the joint chiefs of staff level IV antiterrorism seminars and has testified before the full congressional committee on homeland security. In 2007, he was appointed chief of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) police department, the nation's largest aviation law enforcement agency.
Southers' interdisciplinary methodology has engaged CREATE and LAWA in pilot projects involving the testing of peroxide-based explosives detection methodologies and assistant randomized motoring over routes, designed to detect and deter terrorist pre-attack operations. His international experience includes counterterrorism study and lectures in Canada, Great Britain, Israel and China, where he was invited to assess the proposed terrorism countermeasures for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.