How serious can they be????

Officers who work the border carry a weapon, wear body armor, display a badge, and carry credentials authorizing arrests for violations of federal laws. For years if you wanted to see the who's who of narcotics interdiction and arrests, you didn't look at the DEA, FBI, or the Marshall Service; you went to the border agencies. That doesn't even cover the millions of dollars seized leaving the country by these same officers.

In order to succeed at the above, sometimes you have to fight someone who doesn't want to be arrested. You might have to crawl under a vehicle or on top of a container, or belly crawl to the front wall. You might have to chase someone, conduct a vehicle extraction, arrest a murderer or in the case of Port Angeles stop, pursue, and catch a terrorist. You might have to enter the hold of a ship after stowaways, or board a ship alone in the middle of the night.

As the focus has moved to the interdiction of terrorists and preventing weapons of mass destruction from entering the country, the question arises.... how serious can they be?

How serious can they be when they continue to hire people in their sixties and yes even older? How serious can they be when candidates for employment couldn't even pass muster with some security agencies? How serious can they be when they hire someone you wouldn't even consider to be a night watchman at your business? How serious can they be when they threaten discipline for failing to greet those entering the country with a smile and hearty greeting, rather than steely eyed vigilance and matter of fact professionalism? How serious can they be when they continue to depend on high tech gadgetry instead of utilizing these tools while cracking more containers? How serious can they be when they fail to provide incentives to keep the young officers they do hire from leaving to other higher paying jobs with better retirement systems at other agencies?

How serious can they really be?