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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Conversely, as a hijacker, you'd be taking a huge gamble to try and select the one flight where there were no air marshals.
A lot of times, I feel like this whole concept was based on an inherit deterrent and seems to have worked, in conjunction with increased airport screening:
"The number of hijackings has dwindled in recent years. About 50 have been reported since Sept, 11, 2001, and none in the U.S., according to the Aviation Safety Network."
Reinforced cabin doors and knowing that the terrorists want to kill everyone instead of taking hostages has changed the game. I'm not privy to what influences terrorists but it seems like they can no longer commandeer airplanes
If you're going to be hijacking to use the plane as a weapon you aren't going to be worried about the 1 in 10 chance of an air marshall trying to stop you, any more than the near certain attempt of the other 200 people on the plane trying to stop you. There just aren't legions of people out there willing to kill massive amounts of people in this fashion.
The number of bear attacks in Springfield went to zero in 1996 when Homer started Bear Patrol. It's a case of life imitating art.
Before 9/11 you hijacked a plane, flew to Cuba, got some money, and all was well.
Before 9/11 you were a passenger/crewmember on a plane, you flew to Cuba, then got released, and all was well.
9/11 changed that. No longer were passengers and crew safe as long as they complied, no longer were planes allowed to fly around and even be refuelled safe in the knowledge that all it would take is some money to free them.
As such over the course of two hours the calculus changed. Hijacking the first 3 planes worked because nobody expected it. The fourth plane was also hijacked, but the goal (crashing into whatever building) wasn't met because the passengers and crew found out the rules had changed.
If you hvae 5 people willing to kill themselves for your cause, there are better ways to make a political statement now than the risk of hijacking a plane - not because of any potential air marshall, but because of the guarantee of the passengers.
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.
> 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?
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.
> more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into
The whole point is that you can't tell whether that's happened with the data presented, regardless of what you compare it to, and no, once is not too many times given the actual thing we're discussing.
If the existence of Air Marshals prevented one more 9/11 type event from happening, or even a few failed attempts (which would be capitalized on by politicians to push their own agendas), then I would without reservation say they are worth it. We just haven't been presented with that data. In some cases it may not exist. Acting like the answer to that is irrelevant is not the correct way to go about it though, in my opinion.
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.
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.
