'Serious risk of harm' to people from gardaí not responding to 999 calls

The Policing Authority report recommends a review of the lack of call recording facilities in local garda stations.

An interim independent report into the Garda 999 calls controversy has found that “serious risk or harm” to individuals may have resulted from the cancelled calls.

The review, spearheaded by former chief inspector of constabulary in Scotland, Derek Penman, and commissioned by the Policing Authority, has made 25 findings and 13 recommendations regarding the mass cancellation of 999 calls by gardaí.

More than 200,000 such calls were cancelled between January 2019 and October 2020, the period covered by a Garda review of the matter into more than 2,000 Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault calls (DVSA) which appeared to have been cancelled for “invalid” reasons.

Mr Penman’s much-anticipated report, which was commissioned by the Authority in July after it had expressed its “intense frustration” with the level of detail it had been given by the gardaí regarding the investigation, reveals that four months later he has still not been given access to the 999 calls in question due to “legal issues”.

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Those issues are now being “explored” by both the Authority and An Garda Síochána, the report states, with legal advice being “jointly sought” by both sides. The review found that in some domestic violence and sexual assault calls, the wrong address was taken, meaning no Garda car was ever dispatched.

It concludes that some important incidents may have been missed by the Garda review due to the coding of calls used to narrow the scope of the probe.

While the Garda review had shown evidence of “strategic leadership”, Mr Penman’s report said, “there is less evidence of what assurances were sought for ongoing compliance with the revised policies and mitigations”.

It states that given policies were in place to catch calls cancelled for “unwarranted” reasons, the fact it still happened would suggest that quality assurance and supervision in regional control rooms were "either not followed or not effective”.

It describes the lack of call recording at local stations as “a serious vulnerability” and says that in terms of the Garda review there was “limited engagement” with individual gardaí regarding the cancellations, with instead a “reliance on written directives, technical mitigations, and supervision”.

The report appears to contradict Garda Commissioner Drew Harris’s assertion at the previous meeting of the Policing Authority in October that the issue of cancelled calls could in part be blamed on the force's antiquated computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system.

“At a certain point, we can only do what is humanly possible with the system that we have,” Mr Harris said at that meeting on October 28.

“Despite limitations with the ageing CAD system, the need for explicit text commands means that users must consciously decide what to enter,” Mr Penman’s report states.

“This reduces the likelihood of accidental cancellations. 

The service failures arising from cancelled incidents and other workarounds by members cannot be attributed to failures in the CAD System.

The report recommends as a priority that the gardaí undertake “an urgent review” to ensure effective supervision and “robust performance management processes” are in place for individual gardaí.

It further recommends that the more than 2,000 domestic violence and sexual assault incidents identified by the gardaí’s own review should be used to “assess the effectiveness of current protocols and the consistency of response”.

The lack of call recording facilities in local stations should also be reviewed, the report states, in order to develop “a call recording strategy that meets operational needs and provides safeguards to the Public”.

Mr Penman’s report is due to be discussed with Commissioner Harris at this afternoon’s meeting of the Policing Authority.

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