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jlukecarlson | 3 years ago

Seems like a completely failed program to me. Any organization should be able to quantitatively prove their value on some level. As the article points out, for the DHS to say they do “not have information on [the air marshal program’s] effectiveness” while also averaging a cost of $200 million per arrest is an insane statistic that should immediately require changes in the program.

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Rebelgecko|3 years ago

I haven't checked recently to see if this stat is still true, but at one point the number of people arrested by air marshals was actually lower than the number of air marshals who have been arrested.

skorpeon87|3 years ago

The overwhelming majority of the time, "arrests" on airplanes are made by regular passengers and the flight attendants, who beat up the offender then hogtie him with duct tape. Air marshals are completely pointless.

oneoff786|3 years ago

Like ever? Or while acting as an Air Marshal?

rdtsc|3 years ago

> Any organization should be able to quantitatively prove their value on some level.

There is danger there with corrupt and immoral organizations. They might just start generating false incidents and then run to save the day to pad their stats "look how effective we are!".

Luckily, that only happens with deeply corrupt organizations. Like for instance FBI [1], when they were sending their informants to mosques in US looking to recruit terrorists. Up until the the members of the mosque ended up reporting the FBI agents to the FBI.

--- Niazi and another mosque member had reported Monteilh to the FBI, claiming that Monteilh was espousing terrorist rhetoric and trying to draw them into a plot to blow up shopping malls ---

[1] https://www.ocweekly.com/news-the-fbi-the-islamic-center-of-...

heavenlyblue|3 years ago

> Like for instance FBI [1], when they were sending their informants to mosques in US looking to recruit terrorists. Up until the the members of the mosque ended up reporting the FBI agents to the FBI.

I am not saying what FBI does is good, but this reminds me now that the only way to deal with constant threat of phishing is actually to create false fishing attacks all the time, so that people would be aware of the thread. Could be generally a good approach if the methods employed were more public rather than clandestine.

m463|3 years ago

> averaging a cost of $200 million per arrest

You could play that game with anything. How much does our military cost?

Or maybe, what was the total cost of one 9/11 airplane running into a target?

And there is the hidden properties of deterrence

yamtaddle|3 years ago

I'm sure this has something to do with that entire re-organization feeling more like an excuse to create some contracts for companies connected to administration insiders than it did anything actually useful that couldn't have been accomplished without the creation of a huge new department (and several smaller ones).

roflyear|3 years ago

Imagine being the politician or person who cancels the program, only to have a plane hijacked or whatever.

Spending a few billion of taxpayer money is fine if the cost is your political career or a hit to your political party.

Karellen|3 years ago

> averaging a cost of $200 million per arrest is an insane statistic

That depends on the deterrence of having air marshals.

The argument sounds like one that gets brought up here regularly, when executives lay off 90% of the sysadmins because "nothing ever goes wrong, so why are we paying for them?", and teams that are constantly running round looking like heroes for fixing broken stuff all the time get more kudos than the teams that keep things quietly humming along without any issues.

kelnos|3 years ago

This was my thought as well, but I still think we need evidence of this. If air marshals are primarily there to deal with terrorist threats (and not things like unruly/drunk/whatever passengers), then my feeling is that two things post-9/11 are responsible for the low risk of terrorist acts involving planes (or even just run-of-the-mill ransom-type hijackings):

1. Would-be hijackers can no longer get into cockpits. Pilots would much rather a hijacker kill every passenger and crew member on the plane than gain control of the plane.

2. Passengers don't take shit anymore. They know that, if terrorists successfully take control of a plane, the most likely outcome is that they're all dead. So they'll attack -- and hopefully subdue -- the hijackers.

I expect the effects of #2 have lessened somewhat, given that 9/11 was over 20 years ago, and the memory of it is less raw (not to mention many adults who fly now were young children or not even born in 2001).

If air marshals really do act as a deterrence, there must be some evidence to back that up.

mensetmanusman|3 years ago

If air marshals could get rid of security checks, it would be worth the cost