A police force without public trust can’t fight crime
IF masterful wordsmith Flann O’Brien were still around — and what a shame he’s not — he might survey the wreckage of the recent garda controversies and say: “It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.” There are skewed crime statistics, 14,700 wrongful motoring convictions, financial irregularities, a million missing breathalyser tests – and a man elected to the Irish parliament who believes bushes kill people on our roads, not alcohol.
Come to think of it, perhaps those last two things are connected. Did the gardaí use the phantom tests to breathalyse one million bushes? Who knows? After all, they may as well, because as Deputy Danny Healy-Rae assures us: “Nobody caused a fatality by having three glasses of Guinness drank.” I know, ridiculous, but we are living in a parallel world where the ridiculous reigns – a real-life version of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – Kafkaesque, meandering, fact-bending, though, alas, not anywhere near as interesting.
We don’t really need former Northern Ireland police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan to tell us that the public’s trust in gardaí has been “seriously undermined”, though it’s time to heed her when she says any policing inquiry must start with them.
The focus over the last number of weeks has been on how to establish an independent policing enquiry with powers to transform a force that is prone to corruption, and a government ill-equipped to deal with it.
But any enquiry must also look at the level of (justified) cynicism among members of the general public. A police force that alienates the people it serves is a very ineffective police force indeed.
Baroness O’Loan made that point with supreme eloquence in a wide-ranging interview on RTÉ’s This Week last Sunday. It’s worth listening to the podcast if you have a moment.
Her comments were widely reported though not, strangely enough, what she said about the pressing need to involve the public.
She said Chris Patten, the former British minister who led the inquiry into the RUC in Northern Ireland, went out and talked to everyone. “That is profoundly important,” she said. “You would need to establish the realities of people’s experiences in dealing with the guards. That would be profoundly important.” She used the words ‘profoundly important’ twice and yet we’ve heard little about how any proposed commission might include largescale community consultations as part of the process of designing reform.
What, for instance, has been done to ensure the 47,000 people wrongfully convicted of driving offences can start to believe again in the Garda Síochána?
Did anybody take the time to consider, as Baroness O’Loan did, the terrible impact on each of those people who were summonsed to court? “Those people will have experienced terrible stress,” she said. They will have been obliged to take time off work, pay for lawyers, appear in court, she added.
“Talking to people about their experiences would be a good starting point,” she said.
Garda reform must start with the people on the streets or we must face up to the fact that its ability to fight crime will be seriously compromised.
TV has made us think that crime-solving is all about the scientific data. And it is, but it’s not all CSI and DNA-profiling; a significant number of Irish crimes are solved because people tell the gardaí what they know.
It would be interesting to see statistics on the percentage of crimes solved by public information, though is there a person out there with any faith in garda statistics?
Instead, let’s rely on what the gardaí themselves have said, over the decades, about the role of the public in fighting crime. In 1975, Justice Minister Patrick Cooney went on the TV programme Garda Patrol to thank the Irish public for its efforts in tackling crime.
“The Garda activities have met with some outstanding successes and I can tell you that many of these successes were largely due to the cooperation of you, the public,” he said.
More than 40 years later, despite the transformative power of technology, that message is exactly the same.
In 2016, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) said this: “Gardaí cannot do their job to any acceptable standard without the confidence of the public. When gardaí appeal for witnesses or assistance in investigating a particular crime, that investigation may halt unless members of the public come forward to help.” Halt, mind.
Is there any way of gauging the damage that has been done to that process? Are people now less willing to provide those vital shreds of crime-solving information?
If the ordinary person on the street thinks that what they have to say might be misrepresented, or lost, or used to wrongfully convict, then, they are, understandably, very likely to say nothing at all.
In November 2015, the Garda Inspectorate outlined many of the public’s concerns about policing in its report, Changing Policing. It said gardaí should interact more with the public when patrolling. It identified a need to be more receptive to feedback from the public. It warned, too, that people were taken seriously only when they made a complaint.
Those who were victims of crimes said they were not always updated on the case, which they found very frustrating. The report went on to recommend the appointment of a fulltime community partnership superintendent.
There are many more sensible recommendations contained in this report and several others. It’s not that we don’t know what’s wrong with An Garda Síochána. The issue is why, when the problems are clearly spelled out, nothing has been done to rectify them. As Flann might say: “It’s a very difficult piece of puzzledom.” What’s beyond frightening is the thought of a police force that fails to restore trust in the public. Like our friends in The Third Policeman, “I am completely half afraid to think” about the implications.
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