Air Marshal program costing $200m per arrest

dakotajudo said:
It's your choice to take a congressional speech that references USA Today at face value, but a quick search turns up a GAO report, from 2003, that summarizes over 2000 incidents reported by the Federal Air Marshals, including 444 reports of "Suspicious person", 394 of "Suspicious activities by person", 73 of "Disruptive/disorderly person", 35 of "Medical problems", 28 of "Arrest/detainment by or at request of air marshal", 20 of "Interference with flight crew by passenger" and 19 of "Verbal threats or threatening behavior".

This, over a 2 year period starting in Sept 2001. Perhaps they've done nothing since then.
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Pre- Air Marshalls we had all these type of incidents, and they were all satisfactorily dealt with by exicting measures WITHOUT introducing a fire-arm to the aircraft.
 
Deterrence cannot be judged by a small number acts it did not deter.

For example, the US Strategic Nuclear Arsenal would be judged a complete failure if you judged it by the number of nuclear wars it has won.
 
Leif Roar said:
How often are the air-raid shelters near you used to protect against air raids? Or ICBMs used to enforce MAD? The "useage per dollar of cost" is often a good measure of efficiency, but not always.



Not really -- you can collect statistical data about the number of hijackings before and after the air marshal program was introduced, or between countries with air marshal (or equivalent) programs and those without.
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One could also look at the efficiency of the military (in a specific sub-set of years) and state that they spent god-awful amounts of money but didn't kill any bad guys!

Air Marshals are security and law enforcement. It's basically like insurance. Yea, most of the time you pay through the nose for insurance and get nothing for it. But sometimes something really bad happens and that insurance kicks in and you're glad you had it.
 
Leif Roar said:
Not really -- you can collect statistical data about the number of hijackings before and after the air marshal program was introduced, or between countries with air marshal (or equivalent) programs and those without.
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I think there might be some confounding factors there. The whole culture of air travel changed after 2001--perhaps the fact that we no longer have a policy of cooperating with hijackers has more to do with a reduction in hijacking attempts than the fact that the air marshal program has exploded. And of course not all flights in all countries are attractive targets for hijackers. Another problem is that we had an air marshal program prior to 2001, but what we have now is so different that they cannot be treated as similar--we'd have to compare countries with programs of similar scale to defend the $800 million/year figure.

I made a similar argument on these forums to the one Kevin is making now when Rigoberto Alpizar was killed in 2005, and was met with the same talismanic thinking that he anticipated in his first post. I'm pretty doubtful about the usefulness of this program.
 
DavidJames said:
I'm okay with the money spent. It's easy to take pot shots, making worthwhile contribution, alternative ideas...not so much.
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I think the OP's point is that there there is no real terrorist threat,it was all created by the Bushies.
 
The correct term is "the so-called terrorist threat". Yeah, and remember the so-called twin towers?
 
"These people who don't think my magic rock prevents tiger attacks are crazy. Of course there is such a thing as a tiger attack!"
 
I think the point of the OP is a very good one.

Especially since we've just gone through the long drawn-out and highly scrutinized process for health insurance reform. Opponents are very concerned about anything that would add to the size of the federal government and especially that will increase deficit spending.

Why aren't they similarly concerned about the Air Marshall program?

Many of their arguments against the healthcare reform bill were "just asking questions" as all patriotic Americans should do, so why are they against anyone asking questions about this program?
 
Th OP would have a point, if the purpose of the Air Marshal program was to arrest hijackers. It is not.It is to prevent it from happening. Much like "the purpose of a strong military is to appear so fiercethat no one will dare attack you", the purpose of the AM program is to prevent ideas from becoming deeds.
 
31 posts and no one threatens to kill an Air Marshall with their bare hands. What's this forum coming to? :nope:
 
mumblethrax said:
I made a similar argument on these forums to the one Kevin is making now when Rigoberto Alpizar was killed in 2005, and was met with the same talismanic thinking that he anticipated in his first post. I'm pretty doubtful about the usefulness of this program.
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Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the Air Marshal program is efficient or worth its cost -- I have no idea if it is either.

I'm just saying that if you're going to measure the worth of the program, you wouldn't want to use the number of arrests or the total cost per arrest as a metric as they're meaningless metrics for a program whose main effect was always meant to be deterrence: that's a bit like trying to measure the Quality Assurance process in a factory by looking at how much money you spend on it per each defect widget it discovers.
 
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Leif Roar said:
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the Air Marshal program is efficient or worth its cost -- I have no idea if it is either.

I'm just saying that if you're going to measure the worth of the program, you wouldn't want to use the number of arrests or the total cost per arrest as a metric as they're meaningless metrics for a program whose main effect was always meant to be deterrence: that's a bit like trying to measure the Quality Assurance process in a factory by looking at how much money you spend on it per each defect widget it discovers.
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[derail] Unfortunately, that seems to be what industry is doing nowadays...[/derail]
 
The original OP is a bit like saying, "we spend so much money on AIDS research and just LOOK! Not NEARLY enough people are dying of AIDS! What a waste of money!"
 
Skeptic said:
The original OP is a bit like saying, "we spend so much money on AIDS research and just LOOK! Not NEARLY enough people are dying of AIDS! What a waste of money!"
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What's wrong with saying that (other than "original OP", which is redundant). I thought people on this forum were at least supposed to accept the idea of cost-benefit analysis.

This is similar to the criticism taken by the panel who said it doesn't pay to give women mammograms in their forties. That episode generated all kinds of outrage because, let's face, breast cancer has broad appeal. Emotional appeal. Same thing with planes. What if the program cost 2 billion dollars? Ten billion? How much is too much? Also, one must look at the marginal costs and the marginal benefits. Maybe with the program in place we can grab some of the low-hanging fruit, but it makes no sense to go in search of the lemon atop the tree.

Let's assume that if we stop throwing nearly as much money into the sky, the chance of a terrorist attack slightly increases. Well, it's easy for a politician to demagogue the issue: "our planes are less safe." What's so special about planes? Suppose that money was reinvested in public defibrillators which, according to economists, would yield huge life-saving (and cost-saving) benefits. But it wouldn't matter because heart attacks do not generate the same headlines as a plane crash precisely because they're so common.
 
Cain said:
What's wrong with saying that (other than "original OP", which is redundant). I thought people on this forum were at least supposed to accept the idea of cost-benefit analysis.
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There's nothing wrong with cost-benefit analysis, of course, it's just that the one given in the original post was a bad cost-benefit analysis, as it used an inappropriate measure for the benefit.

The primary purpose of the air marshal program was never to effect arrests but rather to increase the perceived risk of conducting a hijacking and thus discouraging people from trying to do so[1]. It serves the same purpose as an armed guard at a bank: his purpose is not to shoot bank robbers, but to make potential bank robbers decide against robbing the bank.

It's a lot harder to count the number of potential hijackers who decided to not hijack a plane because they were worried about air marshals than to count the number of arrests made by the air marshals but, like the drunk man walking home at night, if we're going to find our keys we have to search where we lost them rather than where the light is better.

To measure the benefit of the air marshal program by the number of arrests made is akin to measuring the benefit of your guard dog by the number of burglars it has bitten.

[1] If you're cynical, you might argue that the actual purpose of the air marshal program is not to deter hijackers but rather to make people feel safer. Still, the nominal purpose is at least to deter hijackers.
 
Leif Roar said:
The primary purpose of the air marshal program was never to effect arrests but rather to increase the perceived risk of conducting a hijacking and thus discouraging people from trying to do so[1].
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People are only using arrests because it's tangible. I agree, if the Air Marshal program is preventing hijackings then, whether we know about them or not, it could be money well-spent. To take the dog analogy a little further, we do not say the pitbull is better than the pack of dobermans because it has immobilized burglars. The pack of dobermans may have deterred attackers. The cost is so high that we should study the program's effectiveness.

It's a lot harder to count the number of potential hijackers who decided to not hijack a plane because they were worried about air marshals than to count the number of arrests made by the air marshals...
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We know why people rob banks. We did not always know hijackers would crash planes into skyscrapers. The under-reported story of 9/11 is how we quickly ordinary people adapted to al-Qaeda's tactics: Flight 93 never reached its target. Within hours. If someone came out with boxcutters right now, he'd go down before he could say "Allahu Akbar!" He would never take control of the plane: Claus would kill him.
 
If the Air Marshall program made many arrests, the same people who are now saying how "inefficient" it is for not making enough arrests, would then say how "inefficient" it is since it obviously isn't deterring people from attempting terrorism on planes.
 
Leif Roar said:
The primary purpose of the air marshal program was never to effect arrests but rather to increase the perceived risk of conducting a hijacking and thus discouraging people from trying to do so[1]. It serves the same purpose as an armed guard at a bank: his purpose is not to shoot bank robbers, but to make potential bank robbers decide against robbing the bank.
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Terrorist attacks on planes still occur, albeit they have all been half-arsed since the USA wiped out the Al Qaeda of 2001 as an effective force in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The current holders of the brand name have proven to be relatively ineffectual, although that might just be because the world's intelligence agencies started to take them seriously.

The half-arsed attacks that have taken place since (like the shoe bomber and the guy who tried to explode his own crotch) were dealt with without the intervention of flight marshals, but they were clearly not deterred by flight marshals.
 
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