Police meet AA182 at LAX today (24 Feb 2019)
 

As the wheels touch down, there is an announcement to stay in your seats and local officials will be boarding the plane. Three police vans are parked at AA hanger and the police and AA safety officials take 3 persons off the plane, one in business and two in coach, escort them down a stairway where at least 2 are handcuffed. We were two rows behind one of the persons and could hear the safety officer ask the person to collect their personal items and deplane. The person was not drunk rude or disorderly and followed instructions. The FA, eager to tell their side as passengers deplaned said that the " f" bomb had been used and did not have to tolerate crude language. One pilot deplaned quickly prior to the passengers. The crew was your standard AA international crew who did the bare minimum and spent loads of the flight talking loudly in the galley and blocking entrance to the front lav for hours on the pretense that the pilots were coming out. As we saw the FA at the luggage area, they loudly proclaimed that they were off the clock and did not need to answer any more questions. We had just finished 3 weeks of very pleasant travel through Oceania and Asia with 4 different airlines and 10 flights with none of this drama. Welcome home AA..going for great as usual.

Considering the amount of headache/paperwork generated by having police involved, especially for an arriving international flight, I hope there is more to this than just crude language.

It depends.

If it is something minor and not worth prosecuting, a quick call to the US Attorney and the individual is simply denied entry and shipped back. If it something serious, they are processed privately and then head off for their appearance.

Or Orange Juice..

If it is something minor, why would they be denied entry?

fixed that for you

If the pax is a US Citizen, pax will likely be escorted by law enforcement through immigration (subject to any secondary screening) and then to airport police holding area. If there is probable cause to believe the pax has committed a crime, pax can be arrested by the appropriate law enforcement agency and booked into jail pending charges, or held in detention to await bail, etc. Otherwise, pax would be released (and may still be subject to charges to arise subsequently).

If pax is a non-citizen, there is more leeway to detain without probable cause (or rather to detain for longer without hurrying to a probable cause determination). No non-citizen has an absolute right to enter, regardless of visa or LPR status, so immigration officers could remove the pax to country of origin for any reason including but not limited to commission of a federal offense onboard. But removal for something like disobeying an FA's request not to hear the F-word seems very very unlikely.

"Minor" is a relative term. Significant enough to result in custody and a provable violation which would be prosecuted if the passengers were US nationals, would be an easy reason to deny entry. It goes without saying that if prosecution is declined altogether because the facts are lacking, that what CBP does is simply up to CBP.

as said above we were 2 rows behind one of the people of interest and saw or heard nothing out of the ordinary during the flight and although citizenship can certainly not be ascertained from appearanes, all three persons were male and caucasian. Did a quick Google search today and couldn't find any more details. We have friends in public safety in Chicago who tell us the calling of police by airlines has increased..not that there is more bad behavior on the part of passengers but a quick trigger by the airlines. Cops don't like to be involved unless there is something significant but we just didn't see anything to indicate that and the exit behavior was very orderly by the passengers, less so the FA who were racing through the aisles and all were gathered at the doorway. They could not have all been witnesses to said behavior but were clearly in it together to back each other up. On our flight back to Ord we talked to the FA about the incident and she was shocked but said there are a lot of issues with the veteran FA and separately with passengers with too much to drink .. One might think that putting a few hundred strangers in a metal tube for hours and plying them with free alcohol at high altitudes is a recipe for incidents .. May be we should be surprised there are not more

Any chance they were prisoners being extradited? The F-bomb comment may have been BS.

I get it's an union/seniority issue, but I never got why the US3 are OK with sticking their dragons on the international routings where, you know, they actually compete with other air carriers while their competent/nice FA's are all operating domestic routings.

Aren't the FAs partially/totally responsible--they served the drinks.

this x 100.