Federal air marshals have gotten together and they want out of the TSA. They want to be real police, and as long as the air marshal service is part of that agency they “feel like they are not performing law enforcement duties.” Instead, they want to be a standalone law enforcement agency with the Department of Homeland Security or, if need be, the Department of Transportation.

In addition to their in-flight responsibilities, that would mean acting more like federal special agents, including conducting investigations, probing insider threats and responding to federal incidents at checkpoints. Now, Casaretti said, “we’re pretty much on aircraft” and lack the level of intelligence to “know specifically why we’re on the aircraft that we’re on.”

There are roughly 3,000 air marshals. That’s 100 times as many as before 9/11. Is the suggestion that they’re overstaffed for current duties, or that we need even more of them? In fact, the air marshals also want less work, a change to their “exhausted, overworked schedule” and lack of “rest breaks” and overtime pay. They’re on flights “crossing multiple time zones” but aren’t given “adequate breaks” between flights. They feel like passengers flying American Airlines through Charlotte or Phoenix!

Of course no air marshal has ever stopped a terrorist or hijacker since the service was founded in 1962. Although an air marshal did shoot and kill a US citizen in 2005. If something really bad did happen on a flight and an air marshal was onboard they lack the training to do anything about it.

An air marshal left a loaded gun in the lavatory of a Delta flight. Another left a loaded gun in a Newark airport bathroom and another in a Philadelphia airport restroom. In 2001 an air marshal left a hangun in an aircraft lavatory where it was found by a teenager.

One actually sued for being denied his first choice of meal in first class and because a flight attendant spilled a drink on him. He approached the cockpit to report these incidents to the captain — and threatened the pilot.

Liam Neeson in 2014 film “Non-Stop”

Air marshals scheduled work assignments to facilitate vacations and sexual trysts. A United flight was delayed to remove a drunk air marshal. We’ve had plenty of cumulative experience with air marshals.

• One “smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was ‘the man with the golden badge.'”

• Another lured a young boy to a hotel room, showed him child pornography, took pictures of him naked and sexually abused him.

• Two air marshals tried to hire a “hit man nicknamed ‘the Crucifixer.'”

• An air marshal abducted a prostitute during a layover in Washington DC.

• An air marshal “pulled his gun in a dispute over a parking space”

• One fired their gun inside a Las Vegas hotel room, another fired theirs in a Phoenix bar fight.

• Not to mention,

  air marshals have taken bribes, committed bank fraud, hired an escort while on layover and doctored hotel receipts to pad expenses, records show. They’ve been found sleeping on planes and lost the travel documents of U.S. diplomats while on a whiskey-tasting trip in Scotland.

We spend $200 million per arrest on the air marshal program. And to be clear that is not $200 million per arrest of a terror suspect, most are just passengers behaving badly.

According to a FOIA request for reports of air marshal misconduct, the TSA shared:

For starters, air marshals were arrested 148 times from November 2002 through February 2012. There were another 58 instances of “criminal conduct.”

In addition, air marshals engaged in more than 5,000 less serious incidents of misconduct, ranging from 1,200 cases of lost equipment to missing 950 flights they were supposed to protect.

…250 air marshals have been terminated for misconduct; another 400 resigned or retired while facing investigation.

Air marshals have been suspended more than 900 times, resulting in more than 4,600 days lost to misconduct.

The Washington field office had the most incidents with 530 cases, followed by New York with 471, Chicago and Dallas with 373 each and Los Angeles with 363. There were 85 cases at air marshal headquarters, highlighting that in some cases, misconduct has extended to the top brass.

It turns out the government knows the air marshal program is such a mess that the TSA formally checks the sobriety of air marshals showing up at the airport. And they go through this step even though the Department of Homeland Security admits they do “not have information on [the air marshal program’s] effectiveness” and they go on to say they do not “have data on the deterrent effect” of the program at all.

Splitting the air marshal service out of TSA, and making them real police, seems unlikely to happen because the ranking member of the committee overseeing TSA, Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), doesn’t support it, and the TSA itself opposes it.

(HT: Paul H)