AGSI calls for face-to-face training for gardaí responding to domestic violence reports

Antoinette Cunningham, President of the AGSI. File Picture: Pat Moore

The president of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, Antoinette Cunningham is calling for face-to-face training for gardaí responding to domestic violence reports.

While protective service units receive such training, they are not the first responders to calls, she said. 

An interim report from the policing authority on the cancellation of 99 calls, some 3,000 of which related to domestic violence, found that garda supervision, quality assurance checks and management procedures were wither not followed, not effective or weak.

"We too listened to the criticisms of the policing authority and felt that in many cases, they were unfair, given that the type of training that our members have received on domestic violence and domestic violence related issues, for the majority of frontline workers, is no more than a portal system of training."

"Many of our members have not received face-to-face interactive domestic violence training for many many years," she said

Ms Cunningham said the training available at present is online and does not go far enough and does not involve interaction with advocacy groups. 

"It is not interactive and it does not involve the support and advocacy groups such as Men's Aid and Women's Aid, which are so important from a victim-centered approach.

"The training our members receive on domestic violence is an online via a learning management system. It's one-dimensional."

Ms Cunningham added that training needed to be inter-agency and interactive.

She said the impact on victims was “very severe” which emphasised the need for this type of training.

"If gardaí don't understand the victims perspective when they're called out to domestic violence calls, then their presence there is less impactful than it should be," she told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland.

She said training needed to "go back" to face-to-face interactive type training rather than online and LMS (learning management) systems.