[jlukecarlson]

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.

[Rebelgecko]

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]

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.

[staunch]

Air marshals may be pointless, but not for this reason.

Air marshals are almost certainly trained not to intervene in minor disturbances. Otherwise a team of hijackers could locate the air marshal by having one person act as an unruly passenger.

[wil421]

If the movies are real they flash their gun and badge to the flight attendant and give them a wink.

[EdwardDiego]

And then get pounced on by Melissa McCarthy.

[wyldfire]

> Otherwise a team of hijackers could locate the air marshal by having one person act as an unruly passenger.

For the last twenty years, hijackers (in flights originating from US) are probably always presumed to be suicidal and much less likely to succeed in a hijacking. To the point where I'd assume that they're rarely even attempted.

Perhaps we could end up needing air marshals in the future, a future where many passengers are not old enough to recall or be affected by the terrorist attacks on September 11.

[iso1631]

At what point is an air marshal supposed to interfere?

[staunch]

(Presumably) only when the fate of the entire aircraft, or a substantial portion of the passengers, is in jeopardy.

[miguelazo]

And the probability of them being on the "right" flight to come to the rescue out of thousands would be..?

[lozenge]

Oh no, the lock on the cockpit has failed! Thankfully an air marshal was able to stop the hikacking by flashing his badge.

[FpUser]

>"Air marshals are almost certainly trained not to intervene in minor disturbances."

It is either are or are not. Almost certainly sounds like you have no clue.

[oneoff786]

Like ever? Or while acting as an Air Marshal?

[mc32]

Yeah, that assertion is very open to interpretation and only raises questions than answer anything.

[pessimizer]

If you heard that more police officers had been arrested than had ever arrested anyone, would it really matter much if those police officers had been arrested as teenagers, or on the job? It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent. Not because they're particularly criminal, but because they are particularly useless.

[kbenson]

> It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent.

Whether that's problematic depends on a lot of things, including whether arresting people is actually the main benefit of them being present.

I have a few dogs. They bark at people walking by on the sidewalk a lot. I've never had someone break into my house. Are the dogs useless as a mechanism to prevent home invasion or burglary, or does knowledge of their presence prevent people from even attempting such? Now consider that I haven't noted whether those crimes are common in my area or not.

Maybe those dogs have growled at guests in my house, making them feel uncomfortable. Should my stance be that they've growled at more guests than intruders they've attacked? Do you feel comfortable making a definitive statement on the value of those dogs and whether the costs outweigh the benefits with the given information, or do you think additional information would be important to discerning that?

[Ironchefpython]

At the point at which your dogs have broken into and robbed your neighbor's house more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into; that's the point at which you can compare your dogs to the Air Marshal service.

[oneoff786]

It would matter immensely imo

[mc32]

Context is important, lest you prime your reader to make unsupported conclusions. Imagine if instead of doing this to police officers, we insinuated things about arrestees instead.

[pessimizer]

> Context is important,

No, context can be important. If all context were important, you couldn't talk about one thing without talking about every other thing. If your argument about why context is important in this case rests on if a hypothetical fact that "people arrested by police have collectively prevented more crimes than they have committed" would be uninteresting or even unfair without context, I'd deeply disagree.

[Rebelgecko]

The latter

[rdtsc]

> 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]

> 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]

> 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]

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]

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]

> 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]

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.

[KerrAvon]

(Nitpicking follows. I agree with your points.)

I don't think #2 actually goes away. It's a cultural shift. Prior to 9/11, the advice was always to just stay calm and let the authorities negotiate with the terrorist, because that had in the past generally led to passengers and plane surviving the incident. That level of passivity isn't coming back.

[mensetmanusman]

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

[Sakos]

Do other countries have anything like this program?

[Animats]

Israel.[1] They had one big success in 1970.

[1] https://www.securitysolutionsmedia.com/2018/04/20/air-marsha...