‘Profilers’ detain a cop at JFK

A RETIRED police chief from North Carolina says he was profiled and unreasonably detained at Kennedy Airport while returning from celebrating his mother’s 80th birthday in Paris.

Greenville’s former top cop Hassan Aden was held at JFK for an hour and a half as U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents attempted to “clear me for entry,” he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post describing the ordeal. Aden (photo) said he was detained on March 13.

“When it goes to 90 minutes with no phone . . . and you can’t move around, it seems more than an investigation to check your passport,” he said Sunday, according to The Associated Press. “It begins to feel like you are in custody . . . . This is my country and with things I see happening, I see certain rights eroding in the name of national security. It’s worrisome.”

Not even Aden’s decades-long law enforcement résumé made a difference. The customs agent told Aden his “name was used as an alias by someone on some watch list.”

Aden, a U.S. citizen whose mother is Italian and father Somali, retired from his two-year stint at the Greenville Police Department in 2015 after spending 25 years in Alexandria, Va., as deputy police chief. He is now a senior policy adviser at the Vera Institute of Justice.

He sat in a detention facility as agents checked his name with a second, but unspecified, federal agency. Meanwhile, Aden reflected on returning home from prior international travels without incident. He also said he watched two dozen fliers funnel in and out of the facility while he was forced to stay put without access to his phone.