Mom and I finished our cruise trip with a TAP Portugal flight from Lisbon to Boston. In every other country that I can remember visiting the people who check passports are unarmed. If there is a perceived likelihood of armed conflict with deplaning passengers there might be one or two specialist soldiers or police officers walking around. At Logan Airport, however, every immigration or customs official was armed with a pistol. Thus there were roughly 100 people with guns confronting the arriving passengers. If this situation is replicated all across the U.S., I wonder why there aren’t more shootings. Presumably it is unlikely that an arriving passengers will actually have a gun, but why wouldn’t there be at least occasional shootings of unarmed passengers by officials saying “I thought he was pulling out a gun”?
[Separately, if you ever do fly TAP Portugal, make sure that you sign up for specific seats towards the front of the aircraft. It seems that TAP operates a three-class service, but the middle class (where you probably want to be) was apparently unknown to our travel agent (Frosch). TAP sells Business for crazy $$. They have a regular Economy for which you pay the Economy fare and then go to their site and pay an extra 25 euro or so to get a seat with a normal amount of legroom (maybe like JetBlue’s worst seats). Then they have a Steerage class in the back for people who are 5′ tall and/or desperately poor and unable to afford the 25 euro. We let Frosch handle everything and of course ended up in Steerage.]
Related:
My experience back when at DeGaulle airport in Paris is that there are lots of armed police moving around and lots of drug and bomb sniffing dogs. I even got held up for 3 hours once while the Police blew up a suspicious package at DeGaulle. It was crazy. They held up everyone from going through customs but did not stop the arrivals. So there were maybe 1000 people crammed into the arrival space but no one was allowed to leave. And after the Brussels bombing I am sure things are even worse with lots more guards.
http://mashable.com/2016/03/23/european-airports-new-security-checks/#f9cZ5InxlZqC
My understanding is that union agreements require all customs officers to be armed regardless of where they work. It is more understandable that an officer at a land crossing or sea port be armed than one in a secured facility like an airport. But they are all the same.
Regarding legroom, Swiss Air seems to operate on the same principles. Not a pleasant experience.
My best experience with Paris CDG was prior departure (to Boston, as it happens) when many, many people had been stuffed into a bus to ride to the airplane, and the personnel declared there was a strike and left us standing there. Nor would they open the doors. It lasted for perhaps 30 minutes and I have avoided Air France ever since.
Question: never having flown in a private aircraft internationally: do travelers on private planes come through the same customs checkpoints? Those guys might conceivably be armed…
The same reason there aren’t more shootings in Beverly Hills: the people there are wealthy enough that their lives matter, so the cops can’t just go around murdering them with impunity.
They haven’t received the same paranoia brainwashing as police: everyone is a threat, any hesitation can result in death. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Maybe I don’t remember it correctly (I never paid attention to it), but I think in Germany the policemen and -women also wear weapons. I guess it’s just standard for police in Germany.
I have often wondered about the same thing. When I worked in federal law enforcement an FBI agent told me that federal employees like to carry weapons because this puts them in a special pay grade where they are eligible for retirement at 50 and mandatory retirement at 57. Don’t know if this is or was true.
Tim: Whether or not police carry weapons is a separate issue. Do the Germans who check passports at airports carry pistols?
SuperMike: Private planes are checked separately at nearly all airports. From what I have seen, the customs officials who check private planes are putting themselves at higher risk by carrying pistols. They often work alone and have their heads stuck into a cargo door, for example. Their attention is concentrated on a Geiger counter or similar instrument. A malicious person could approach them from behind, take the pistol, and use it against the official (see https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2013/fall/guns-kill-cops-statistics/ for how “In 10 percent of cases, officers were shot with their own guns.”).
philg: yes, at German airports the federal police is responsible for checking passports.
https://www.google.de/search?q=bundespolizei+ausweiskontrolle+flughafen&rlz=1CATAAB_enUS635US636&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizmrqSrtDWAhVib5oKHd1cBW8Q_AUICygC&biw=1920&bih=942#imgrc=pb2xHeyrbOGV6M:
Because more guns does not necessarily mean more shootings. Sometimes, it means fewer. And in any case, we are talking about reasonably well trained people here. Even the lesser-trained concealed carry licensees that we now have 15.7 million of in this country (source: John Lott, and it doesn’t include Constitutional Carry states citizens) rarely commit either crimes or mistakes. But you knew all of this already.
Jack: I think you’re right about interaction with the pension system. https://www.opm.gov/retirement-services/fers-information/computation/ says that the retirement pay for “law enforcement officers” is a lot higher than for unarmed government workers. https://www.cbp.gov/careers/frontline-careers/cbpo/pay-benefits#Retirement says that essentially all CBP folks who work at airports are “law enforcement officers” and that “Enhanced Retirement coverage means you can retire at any age after 25 years of service or at age 50 with at least 20 years of service.”