The 4,000 air marshals who have been put in place on the ridiculously insignificant chance that they will be in a position to stop a hijacking or other significant event make about 4 arrests a year altogether, a fact that was brought to light last year by Rep. John Duncan and mentioned more recently by analyst Bruce Schneier. As Rep. Duncan explained it on the floor back then:
Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals.
We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 employees.
Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four arrests each year by the entire agency. In other words, we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest. Let me repeat that: we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.
Obviously, there are a number of situations in which one can point to a cost and make it appear to outweigh the benefits by way of some calculus that doesn’t really take everything into account, but this doesn’t seem like one of them, regardless of whether the number of arrests is really the metric we should be looking at. It would be hard to make the case that this is the best use of that money, whether in the realm of security or the dozens of other areas in which it could have been spent (or not spent).
Good grief.Report
This reminds me of comedian Pat Paulsen’s 1968 “presidential campaign” when he said “It’s costing the United States $200,000 for every Viet Cong we kill. Did anyone stop to think they could be bought off cheaper than that? I know I could be bought cheaper than that.”
However, not to argue that this is money well spent, insofar as I accept the claim that gun ownership discourages the commission of crimes, I would also accept the argument that the mere presence of air marshals may have had a significant threat reduction. In neither case can such claims easily be substantiated, let alone captured statistically. Clearly, however, mere arrests like actual private use of firearms to prevent or defend against crimes does not tell the whole story.Report
Some have made a similar argument about the Taliban.Report
One can never even begin to quantify the effect of prophylaxis.Report
Not true, with statistical techniques you can try to tease the effects of prevention out by counting incidents as you vary the level of prevention put in place. I will agree that this isn’t really feasible with low-probability events like terrorism though.Report
Thank you, James K. Of course you’re correct. The recent study on circumcision in lowering transmission rates of HIV in Africa supports your point.
So, of course, circumcision rates are plummeting in the US.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/archive/2010/08/17/circumcision-rates-plummet-uh-oh.aspxReport
I’d rather be taught to wear a condom than have part of me cut off before I am old enough to decide.Report
See it as a sacrifice that we ask people to make for the benefit of all society.
That usually makes it better.Report
I’ll try to think about it that way.Report
Blood for the blood god?Report
Foreskins for the foreskin throne?Report
Thanks for the math lesson Mr. Duncan, and how many terrorists have those metal detectors stopped? Hmmm, sounds like a boondoggle ready for nipping to me. Besides, my metal has a damn right not to be detected!Report
In Japan, instead of just reducing the number of firefighters to account for safer heating technologies, fire trucks go on random patrols with sirens on and everything in case they just happen to come across a huge fire. The air marshall’s program is much stupider than that.Report
There is also the cost (though not borne by the taxpayer – until another bailout that is) of one or two marshals taking up the first class seats which are the most profitable ones for the airline.Report
It would be interesting to see what kinds of arrests those arrests are. If all four arrests made per annum are arrests that prevented a plane from its destruction, and if your average flight on which the arrests are made carries, say, 175 passengers, then you are paying $285,714 for each passenger death prevented. That still seems like a lot of money to get the job done, of course, but you can’t easily argue that for that investment you could fly people on private jets, because you don’t have a list of who needs to have a private jet in advance so you’d have to fly everyone that way. And of course, it’s very challenging to put a price on lives lost (or ancillary effects of that).
However, if those four arrests are drunkards causing a disturbance who are just being arrested by the air marshal rather than by ground authorities simply because the marshal happens to be there, then the case that it’s wild overspending is much stronger.Report
This exactly. I’ve spent about an hour online looking for a terrorist caught by TSA. Not an extensive search, but I was only able to find four arrests. One was for possessing heroine, the other three were for carrying falsified documents.
I’d really like to see some hard numbers on how many people the TSA processes, how much stuff they confiscate, and how many terrorists they catch.Report