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As a policy expert and researcher who has studied these issues for over a decade and who is reading "defund police" debates occurring in the press and in policy circles, may I suggest that any efforts to defund law enforcement should begin with disbanding the US Air Marshals. 1/n
Why begin here?
It's an agency that can be defunded nationally in a single maneuver.
It's a group of people who are demonstrably ineffective.
Airplanes are a place where people of all parties and colors agree we should take safety seriously and protect everyone. 2/n
It's an agency that can be defunded nationally in a single maneuver. It's a group of people who are demonstrably ineffective. Airplanes are a place where people of all parties and colors agree we should take safety seriously and protect everyone. 2/n
Since September 11, 2001, more Air Marshals have been arrested than people have been arrested by Air Marshals. In fact, it's not even close. These 3,000-ish men and women cost us about $870M annually and they tend to get arrested for crimes reaching from domestic violence to 3/n
DUIs (sometimes driving to the airport and being so drunk TSA won't allow them past security, according to Ron Nixon's @NYT piece two years ago), and moving women for sex on the planes they're supposed to be protecting. We don't know how effective the Marshals are, but we're 4/n
reasonably confident the numbers are really, really bad - so bad TSA stopped keeping track (quote from Ron Nixon's piece, below). And we don't have good data on their performance because often when stuff happens they aren't on the plane. Remember the "shoe bomber"? What about 5/n
the "underwear bomber"? Well, we don't know what the Marshals would have done in those serious threat situations; they were too busy conducting research on how to fit 6 Jack-and-Cokes in the 3 hours and 32 minutes between Oklahoma City and Memphis. Then there's the bathroom. 6/n
Marshals have the not-great habit (we aren't sure whether this is primarily when they're drunk or sober) of leaving their firearms in the lavatories. So common is this that there's an instruction to them about it. It happens to the best of us... even former PM David Cameron's 7/n
bodyguard leaves his pistol in the British Airways lavatory now and then. Oh, wait, it doesn't happen to all of us. Why? Maybe because we aren't all glorified mall cops entrusted with the staggering responsibility of having a firearm on a crowded passenger jet! Might be why. 8/n
We pay most of a billion dollars a year for an impotent police force that makes less than one arrest per Marshal per year while themselves getting arrested more than that AND putting us all at risk by giving the drunk guy in seat 23F a pistol. Defund police? Cool, start here. 9/9
