Are Sky Marshals Safe?

Are Airline Air Marshals Safe?

Do Cowboy Police With Pointing Loaded Guns Keep Passengers Safe?

By Roy D. Follendore III

September 2, 2002

Even organized crime members like the Sopranos would probably tell you that the Police are often good people to have around. But there are times when having the Police around is just not safe. The mindless urge to chase bad guys often causes innocent people to get run down on the streets and even gets innocent people shot and killed. Police can easily instigate dangerous situations instead of keeping the peace. Part of the reasons for this has to do with the kind of training that Police are given. Police are not trained to be psychologists because they are expected to look and react to danger. As a result they are trained to respond to situations in a limited number of ways, primarily with the use of immediate and overwhelming force. Among the brotherhood of Police it is considered weakness to let a suspect get away.

From the instant the Police begin to react to a situation, a psychological line is drawn between themselves and the rest of society. Those that are within the line are good guys and those that are outside are potential enemies. If you are a law abiding citizen who happens to be on the outside of that line, then it is possible that you have just as much to fear from the Police as you might from the bad guys. An inadvertent event can cause any law abiding citizen to become an instant suspect. It is even easier to change from a suspect to a perpetrator. When one is looking down the black barrel of a loaded gun, honesty and fear is not considered an adequate excuse. In that situation, any one of us can become an honest statistic, an honest mistake. The words flow out of the report of the findings like shell casings coming from a nine millimeter automatic. "The Officer then thought his life was in danger and took appropriate action. The results were of course tragic... The Officers handled the situation properly." Of course normal law abiding citizens can usually avoid such dangerous situations by using common sense and staying away from situations where things like this might happen.

But what if we citizens are trapped in an enclosed space where we can not escape? Delta Flight 442, recently had 183 people on board and was heading from Atlanta to Philadelphia. The flight was normal until two Air Marshals suddenly jumped up pulling their guns. One took down and forcefully arrested a passenger who witnesses later said had not been doing anything wrong. He was taken off to the front of the aircraft. The other Marshal stood in front of the passengers pointing a loaded automatic pistol at their faces for the duration of the flight. A judge and a social worker were a part of those passengers were absolutely astounded at the Marshal's over reaction. As far as they were concerned all of this occurred for no reason. The man who was apprehended and the man behind him were questioned released because it was found that they had done nothing. What evidently triggered the Air Marshals into their action was their own imagination. The Air Marshals had reacted to something that was not real and in doing so had endangered the passengers on the flight. However, that is not the way that the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), the organization that oversees the Air Marshals, saw things. The official message that went out to the public was that the Air Marshals "did their job correctly." There were no errors in the decision making process of the Air Marshals. They did everything exactly by the book, "case closed." Where do they get these politicians to run the security of an organization?

We all should be amazed about this situation because evidently the definition of what the job of our police is has not only changed, it has been extended. Committing physical assault on innocent passengers and pointing loaded weapons at innocent citizens who have been systematically unarmed is now considered to be "by the book." Something is terribly wrong here folks. Passengers are citizens who should have the right to travel without harassment and intimidation. But we are also customers of the airlines whose duty is to the care and well being to their passengers. The duty of the airlines includes both our psychological as well as our physical well being. American Airlines did not choose to make a statement about what occurred because it was not in the interest of their business. If American Airlines does not have the passengers interest at heart then whose interest does it have? Could their lack of reaction be because they are getting billions of dollars from the Federal Government to prop them up from bankruptcy?

Maybe it is time that the airlines who fail to stand up for the rights of passengers should be allowed to go out of business themselves. When you think about it, nothing could be more "American" than that. Both the TSA and the Air Marshals who were on flight 442 owe the passengers and the general public an apology. Any good will that Air Marshals might gain in the future is being destroyed by the over simplified training they are given. Officers protecting the public with handguns on an aircraft should not be allowed to be terrorist thugs. Much of the foolishness going on in the name of airline security today is because the experts who were put in charge are incompetent. Is this the real reason why you have been asked to give up your civil rights?

The managers that are running security today are too hopped up by their sense of power and control to figure out that they are destroying the industry they say they are trying to protect. My suggestion for regaining airline security sanity is simple. Write your congressman. While you are at it, simply stop booking tickets on airlines that are not wiling to take your safety, welfare and comfort seriously. That will get the message to them before it is too late.

Remember, every passenger that looks or acts a little odd is probably not a terrorist. The guy that jumps up to get a pack of gum to stop his ears from popping is probably not a terrorist. The guy that just wants to get his notebook from the overhead compartment is probably not a terrorist. The foreign speaking group who talk between seats and pass cards in preparation for their business meeting are probably not terrorists. If you don't agree, the next time you take a flight, take a pocket mirror. The next suspect the Air Marshals take down could be you because you seem to be odd.

Note: In a recent message one reader was particularly critical of this essay. He accused me of forgetting 911. He pointed out that police have a tough job and because of that fact I was accused of whining, being an Monday morning quarterback and not supporting our police. I reread this article considering his perspective and I could not disagree more. I do not see where I wrote that the police do not have a tough job. I do not see where I wrote that the police are not sometimes necessary. I do not see where I wrote that they are not for the most part brave, trustworthy, loyal, true, honest and reverent. In short, I did not say that the police and the Air Marshals are not wonderful people. What I did ask involved the basic question of whether having Air Marshals on board an aircraft was safe, given the airline security incidents where there were no terrorists involved.

What I also did not write were the historical mortality statistics of the past in situations where armed police are involved. In 1999 it has been estimated that our Police were killing an average of 373 innocent people each year. That statistic has gone up. In addition, from 1976 to 1998 police nationwide killed 8,578 suspects — 56 percent were white and 42 percent black. 61 police were killed in 1998. During 1998 that means that 140 suspects are killed for every police officer. It also means that six times more innocent people were killed by Police than Police killed in the line of duty by the bad guys. These incidents are mostly shootings and the numbers of course do not count 911 situation where the Police were killed from the terrorist that bombed buildings that fell on them.

What these numbers tell is that in situations where Police feel they must act with deadly weapons, the innocent are in mortal danger from the Police. If you are near that Policeman who is your best friend, the moment that he or she decides to pull the macho overwhelming armed force move to apprehend or subdue an apparent threat, they may easily be putting your life at risk. This is particularly true when the Police are attempting to act like the military and therefore desire to kill that threat. What the numbers should tell us is that the right kind of training and a better means of selection of emotional talent for the these jobs are needed. This is particularly true for difficult to recognize, closed situations like aircraft antiterrorism threats. Simply pulling Border Police out of their jeeps, giving them a few weeks of DieHard orientation with guns and forcing them to fly for twenty hours a day, six days a week without rest was not correct.

The justification of my essay is that within an enclosed and already dangerous space like an aircraft in flight, the kind of overwhelming force demonstrated by the the U.S. Air Marshals in the incident I described was far more than just unwarranted. If the objectives of our protectors aboard airlines does not include protecting the airlines business from harm then the objective of protecting the passengers becomes a moot point. There will not be enough passengers willing to pay their good money and be subjected to unwarranted counter-terrorism punishment. It was found that the man that the Marshals held and tied up at gunpoint on that flight I mentioned was a United State Army Major who was simply getting a security checked item he left in his overhead compartment. The passengers that the U.S. Air Marshals held hostage at gunpoint for hours were a judge, a sheriff, and a collection of innocent men women and children. Think about the situation in context. A person holding a loaded gun on you for hours is not your best friend and it is questionable that he or she is even on your side. Given the events of the 911 hijacking, it would not have been surprising if the passengers had revolted out of fear. There would be no better way to assume control of an aircraft in flight than to impersonate the actions of an Air Marshal to the passengers. Hijackers lie to the people that they hijack. The moment that the U.S. Air Marshals wrongly profiled their suspected terrorist, they setup a situation where they were in fear of their fellow passengers. There were multiple layers of failures in security involved in that particular situation.

There were people like you or me who complained on September 10th, 2001 that anyone who mentioned the need for better airline security were Monday morning quarter-backs and whiners. One of these people was a security expert and former FBI agent that worked in at the World Trade center. He died the next day on September 11th. There were people in Government who were demanding that the terrorist that were to hijack the aircraft on 911 be found and arrested. That did not happen because these people were considered to be more Monday morning quarter-backs and whiners. As it turns out, these people were dissenters who were also true to America. After 911 the incompetent policy makers who previously ignored the threat jumped on board. The horribly useless knee-jerk airline security measures that were put into place immediately after 911 were wrongfully established and enforced out of fear. Let me make it perfectly clear here that I am not talking about the legitimate airline security measures. But security is always competing with commercial interests and unless we are willing to nationalize the airline industry into the Federal Government, it will always be that way. It is a basic fact that when the interests of security and the commercial interests are unbalanced we are playing into the hands of our enemies.

Before the single incident of 911 there has historically been a higher probability that the a citizen will be killed by a Police Officer than by a terrorist. If our Police are successful at deterring terror that will remain true. To minimize the potential of unnecessary innocent deaths further, we all should support better police candidate selection, better and longer training and improved police policies and tactics. The majority of the implementation of better police policies might well evolve around technical solutions that mean getting behind a keyboard instead of a badge and gun.

It is an insult to our men and women behind a badge to ask them to try to be both the military and the police. They are not the same roles and they do not have the same objectives. It is also an insult to ask them to carry out crazy and useless security policies that induce them to consider and treat every citizen like a terrorist. Air Marshals should be our best people who should be held to a higher standard than what we saw in the Delta Flight 442 incident. But to protect them and us, their TSA management should have been held to an even higher standard. The only way for the average citizen can support this process of improvement is to avoid unnecessary flights until these security bureaucrats clearly understand this and do something about it.

I am a writer and I also happen to be a Professor who teaches about the issues of security. I am also a pilot and I know exactly what can be expected by putting a bullet through a window, a fuel line or into a room full of scared passengers at thirty thousand feet. It was exactly because of my concern for poor security planning and operations that our Air Marshals must work in and the passengers must fly in after 911 that I wrote the article.

One of our readers has recently written...

December 7, 2002

"As an aviation security subject matter expert working with the International Civil Aviation Organization, I think that your essay on this subject is correct in highlighting that most of your government security agencies ( and military for that matter) have an ingrained habit of refusing to say or admit they were ever wrong. You might like to pass along to your readers in other such essays that experience of working with American security agencies usually shows them to be over funded, poorly organized, over bureaucratic and usually incapable of producing the results required without generally annoying almost everyone they come in to contact with or work alongside. We put up with this because we simply cannot afford to do the job without your assistance and logistical support. In summary we always assume that whenever we have to operate with American security agencies there will always be casualties, unfortunately they are usually on our side."

In spite of this statement, the British have now decided to put Air Marshals on their aircraft.

The safety of the airline air marshal program is really about your personal security. The risks for flights with serious hijackers may or may not go down but the risks for flights without hijackers has gone up. Before you purchase your next airline ticket and certainly before you step on that plane you should understand the risks. You decide.

Need to know more about this important issue from a separate source?

Check out the USAToday interview with an Air Marshal who was willing to speak out about the problems they face. Click on: www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20021219/4714029s.htm

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