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Drones Cost $28,000 Per Arrest, On Average
mpicpp sends this report from CNN:
They are sleek, mostly silent converted weapons of war: Drones used by the Border Patrol to scan the skies in the empty deserts of the Southwest to spot illegal immigrants and then, if things work out, have agents arrest them. That's the idea, and the agents who use them say the drones give them a vantage point they never had before. Flying at 18,000 feet, the drones view the landscape below, lock onto potential suspects crossing the Arizona desert, and agents on the ground move into make the arrests. But it's outrageously expensive: $28,000 for a single arrest.
Let's assume for a moment that they're serious about deporting people.
What's the cost if they get through, and have to be tracked down by traditional methods? What's the cost of putting more people there to achieve the same level of effectiveness? What's the cost of flying conventional aircraft to do the job?
When pitted against those methods by comparison, $28,000 might actually not be all that bad.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Instead of using a multi million dollar Predator drone to scan the border, perhaps they should be using something smaller and cheaper like a beefed up version of a Parrot drone instead.
Do we really need something that flies at 18,000 feet to patrol the border?
Besides the creepy, WWII-axis-power name, they are in essense a sanctioned thugs who kill without consequences, just like those on the DDR Wall.
Getting lots of money to War, Inc. is the *goal*; the way it's dressed up doesn't really matter that much.
scan the skies in the empty deserts of the Southwest to spot illegal immigrants
Hey guys, I think I see the problem.
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except for the military, naturally. Republicans love them some war boners.
The metric "$ per suspect catched" is pretty much meaningless. If they have 1 suspect for the whole year and do arrest him, the cost per arrest will be their yearly budget - and guess what? The border still needs to be guarded. The important numbers would be the the cost increase/decrease vs drone-less operation and the percent of trespassers missed.
...considering we spent around 250,000 rounds of ammo per kill in Iraqistan.
And of course, illegals
* Prop up the economy
* Depress the working wage
If they actually managed to put up a proper border control, people might have to pay their gardener / maid / pickers a decent wage....
It must be hard being a right-wing politician. On one hand, wanting "American jobs for Americans!". On the other hand, not wanting to actually have to pay for them.
Can you really put a price on oppression? Not everything has to be about the bottom line.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Not about cost. It's about value.
For that cost, for the price of a couple of drones you could put another couple of officers, stationed permanently to do just their job. And thereby free up whatever officers would also, presumably, need to be present to enable the original drones to operate too.
Simplify the choice - one drone, or two officers (maybe an officer and a half) on the ground doing the same job and NOTHING else - and the value motive really comes to the fore.
Law enforcement isn't about what it costs. Hence why the UK police are still sitting outside the Ecuadorian embassy at the moment waiting for Assange to move out of his personal prison to go to an official one. But it's about value. One high-profile "celebrity" openly-flouting the law is enough to encourage a whole spate of lawlessness in following suit, and you'll have every shoplifter and petty criminal claiming asylum in embassies to evade the law within a month.
So the cost motive would mean we'd leave him in there and forget about him because "he's too expensive to care about". And also that we wouldn't bother to deport illegals.
The value motive says we stay there to dissuade this kind of activity in future and make sure it doesn't cost more in the long run. And that illegals are deported at huge costs to prevent being seen as "weak".
Funny how changing one word (cost -> value) can change the whole intention of your post, isn't it?
Exactly. Because military is one of the very few things, which is the government's actual responsibility per the Constitution.
Most of the rest is just that — unconstitutional:
The lost "War on Poverty", which we've been fighting for the last 50 years, has cost us — inflation-adjusted — $22 trillion or, roughly three times more than all actual wars combined since founding of the Republic .
Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Pretty soon you won't be able to go camping or take a walk without being watched by a drone. Of course, you wouldn't even get that far if your license plate wasn't in order since that will have been scanned dozens of times during your trip.
If we(all of us) stop employing the illegal immigrants they will stop jump, tunneling, bussing, boating, and swimming to the US. How about instead of buying guns and drones we set up databases and fine the companies and people employing folks illegally. Its simple.
I lived in Nevada and the landlord used to complain every day about all the illegals in the area. I got frustrated with her one day and stated if you stop employing them to paint, do yard work, and cook they would all leave or at least stop coming here.
Farmers need some method to get folks willing to help to the farms, that system has to be in place along side the other ones.
Once the Nancy pelosi's and others employing them as maids and gardeners get fined and put in prison this will end. You will never stop this with drones or guns. Stop the Money and you stop the problem. At this point in time, I'd jump the fence and take the chance just like they are in their positions.
Taking a vacation to america to have a baby has to end also. Its an archaic method that has to stop.
At first glance I was prepared to say, "Expensive compared to what?" I was initially prepared to support the drone program. But when I read TFA and got some details, I think it would be fair to say that this drone program is something of a failure.
The border is always in the same place, and therefore the same areas are being patrolled. You don't need a drone to do that. Couldn't you practically accomplish the same thing with observation blimps at a much lower cost? Sure, it doesn't quite have the same "cool" factor, but I would wager it could get the job done.
Proverbs 21:19
Should we start analyzing the US military's cost per kill of enemy combatants last year?
The lost "War on Poverty", which we've been fighting for the last 50 years, has cost us — inflation-adjusted — $22 trillion or, roughly three times more than all actual wars combined since founding of the Republic
Anyone who thinks that the US has spent less than 7 trillion dollars on war, total, and adjusted for inflation, is cherry-picking from a very conservative data set. No wonder the linked article doesn't give a citation for that figure.
Please, don't hate.
Ho ho ho, that's rich coming from you.
Take the development cost plus all of the manufacturing costs and divide by the number of arrests so far....
So with every arrest, the average price decreases! Let's see it in 10 years.
If you hope to one day collect a social security check from the Ponzi scheme that it is, you'd better start welcoming immigrants with open arms.
And the verdict on the cost of the lazy doughnut gobbling cop at the wheel is? There is really no substitute for police foot work, distractions involving the suspected perpetrators neighbor in a bikini is far more expensive.
As opposed to Democrats who love illegal immigrants and want them here by the millions, but then can't understand why wages can't keep up as the labor market gets flooded.
"A supermajority of voters favor deficit spending, so that's the policy we currently have."
So why cry about "outrageous" spending in the first place?
"Amortize the deficit across everyone, and you'll find that all households cost "the taxpayer" many thousands of dollars per year."
You apparently missed the 'net' part of my comment. If you'd RTFA, you'd see that Heritage was talking net results, meaning total contribution vs cost; And yes, that means that a giant pile of American citizens are leeches, you're saying it's ok we add more?
Personally, I'd love it if such a calculus determined your vote: if you are a net 'taker' = no vote. (Including corporate welfare for corporate officers, of course.)
-Styopa
Dear Cthulhu, I just noticed that he cited /Infowars/ and expected people to take it seriously. Infowars, founded by Alex Jones, who never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
Ah, so it is not about "compassion" or "children", after all, is it? Interesting way for the truth to come out...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously? You are disputing the figure, because I cited Infowars? Ok, how about these guys? True to form, and with the customary wit and sophistication, the DailyKos are "killing the zombie lies about the war on poverty" — but even they cite and do not dispute the cost of the war: $22 trillion in today's (well, last year's) dollars.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I did some calculations and I'd like a critical review. My disagreement with the number is that they are including the price of the drones in the first year operation. I don't think that's a valid comparison to cost per apprehension. Thus, I would like to know the total operational cost, which is number of hours times cost per hour. The number of hours from the report is calculation as 22% of the goal of 16hrs/day for 365 days (or 1284.8 hours). The cost per hour calculated by OIG is $12,255. Thus, a total cost of about $15.7M. Divide that by 2,272 apprehensions for an actual cost of $6,930.12 per apprehension.
Yes, yes, anyone who disagrees with you is a moron, right.
One would have thought, Hans Christian Andersen took care of this kind of argument, but an opinion of a long-dead White dude does not matter to you, does it?
Well, this one does — and though it disputes a number of claims (referred to as "zombie lies" with the site's usual politeness), it disputes neither the $22 trillion figure nor the "triple the cost of real wars" part.
If you want to quibble, offer your own citations. You can start right here.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Works every time on assholes, who think their hate is uniquely justified, whereas everybody else needs to "stop being a hater".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You may find it hard to believe, but I don't count Kos as a reliable source either. They're just as interested in pushing a political POV as Infowars.
Given your inability to pick any sort of reliable politically-neutral source, I'm going to assume you're a fucktard and ignore you.
You have remarkably little self-awareness.
Not at all. Because the intention of my post was to expose yet another bit of an orchestrated campaign in support of mass immigration.
And not by people like myself, who are attracted by Americans' freedoms and seek to escape oppressive regimes at home. No, those folks are rather inconvenient — for they tend to argue and fight for preservation of those freedoms that they found so attractive in the first place.
No, our overlords in Washington (one party only slight more so than the other) are happy with docile people from poor countries coming here for purely economic reasons. These immigrants don't love America (some outright hate it), they root for foreign sports-teams and can not be trusted to defend the country.
But they come from corrupt poor countries, where government is the primary source of wealth, and are not bothered by the same becoming the accepted state of affairs here. Which suits our prosperous elites perfectly...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If both sides cite the same figure without disputing it, it may, actually, be correct...
The approach works for courts, it might work for you. Think about it...
There aren't any.
Love you too!
How will I even know? Will you be reminding me once in a while?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maybe at the beginning "tech" sounded like a potential solution for border control. But a combination of immature technology and contractor graft made it way too expensive.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po...
What an incredibly one-sided story. First of all, the border patrol does not arrest and adjudicate the vast majority of border-crossers. After a simple computer look-up to see if they are criminals, they load them up on a bus and drop them off on the other side of the border. They only care about "arresting" law breakers, i.e., drug dealers. The CNN article did not report what some other new feeds did: "In 2013, the arrests by drone brought in $66,000 per hour of contraband seizures." They are concerned about and going after real threats to our country.
If the goal is to arrest people that might be unreasonable.
If the goal is to reduce the number of illegal border crossings, this is not a valid metric to look at.
So, for the 1,250,000 illegals a year, it would only cost 32,500,000,000$ per year so that nobody would cook my dinner at Denny's anymore?
The widespread use of helicopters in law enforcement is largely a waste of money as well. Nearly all LE helicopters are flown, by policy, at altitudes and speeds appropriate for fixed wing assets that cost 1/8th as much to purchase and operate.
It's a boondoggle. When the budgets come down, it is always the "don't take away our chopper, man. They are so cool and intimidating to crooks" arguments. They seldom provide *any* additional utility in practice (planes orbit a scene at the same speeds and altitudes).
If you were to load the incidents that use a helicopter's specific abilities in those rare incidents that require them, the costs are astronomical. In LA, only 4 incidents from an entire fleet that costs several 10's of millions of dollars were recorded in 2013.
It makes drones look like a deal by comparison. Or not...
When considering the cost of finding and deporting illegal aliens, it must be compared against the cost of failing to find and deport them. Some aspects of illegal aliens are: drunken unlicensed illegal drivers killing pedestrians (no, licensing them does not make it OK), new outbreaks of measles, mumps, and tuberculosis, and the World Trade Center. Still think it's too expensive to eliminate illegal aliens?
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Sometimes number crunching is simply for the sake of data gathering before making an opinion, in order to make the best, most-informed opinion. If you're making an opinion based on the 28K/arrest, then it's IMO inherently wrong, because the number is wrong. If not "wrong," then it's at least misinformed. By virtue of you reading through this article and comments, and then commenting here, I assume you're interested in the subject, as should every U.S. citizen of voting age. But, basically, my opinion is irrelevant with respect to first gather facts.