Arming the gardaí is not the answer — the criminals will just shoot first

IT’S sad but true. You know it and I know it. The way things are going, one of these days — perhaps not so far into the distant future — some coked-up young scumbag in Dublin, Limerick or Cork is going to murder an unarmed garda.

That’s not being alarmist: it’s a killing waiting to happen — “accident” is the wrong word. What’s more, should that law enforcement officer happen to be a woman, our sense of outrage will only be compounded.

On September 25 last, in Dublin’s inner city, Garda Paul Sherlock from the traffic branch very nearly became such a statistic. He came within a whisker of losing his life, gunned down after having detected an attempted bank raid during the morning rush hour.

So what should our response be to such a “known unknown”, as Donald Rumsfeld would have called it? We know some poor garda is going to die. We just don’t know where or when.

There’s no point whatsoever waiting until the horse has bolted, some say. Violent crime is rising. Let’s meet fire with fire. Level the playing field and arm the gardaí. Should the commissioner “do nothing”, as they see it, those same gung-ho commentators and voices within the Garda Representative Association will be calling for his head before the unlucky garda’s body is cold.

It’s all so predictable, both the tragedy (because no one believes the war against the drug gangs is being won), and the told-you-so response.

Having never paid my dues to the Lily-Livered Liberal Society and having spotted a passing bandwagon, it’s sorely tempting to jump on board. After all, on the very rare occasions when the RUC shot IRA men and loyalists in the course of doing what they do best, the tears — even crocodile tears — never came. “Live by the sword, die by the sword” was my motto.

Moreover, when you learn that the Swiss cantonal police carry guns all the time to protect them from dangerous yodellers, you wonder what makes Ireland so different.

The French police do; the Germans and Italians the same — everyone it seems except the Brits and, for reasons bound up with our shared history, the men and women charged with keeping the people of this Republic safe at night and, increasingly, during the daytime as well.

Sir Robert Peel — the father of modern British and Irish policing — has a lot to answer for, according to the gun lobby. Returned unopposed to the House of Commons at the tender age of just 21, he represented the rotten borough of Cashel from 1809 to 1812 before becoming Chief Secretary under Lord Liverpool following Spencer Perceval’s assassination.

Apparently, Peel believed his original Peace Preservation Force, the forerunners of the RIC, should not only carry mere batons but they should be hidden from view on an officer’s person. The tradition of routinely unarmed police endures to this day in these islands. To give every cop a gun would change their character forever.

No one, in fairness, approaches this question lightly, but Britain is moving towards armed police and we must do the same, the gun lobby say.

“According to the Home Office, 7,000 authorised officers now carry firearms,” one Irish Sunday paper (reliably as it happens) told us last weekend. That number of bobbies with Glocks and sub-machineguns does indeed sound a lot, but we must remember the differences of scale. Somewhere around 14,000 gardaí police a population of four million; a quarter have already been weapons-trained.

In Britain, those 7,000 carrying guns represent just 5% of police officers in England, Scotland and Wales, rising to 10% in London’s Met where, let’s just say, there are threats the gardaí have thankfully not had to face.

Britain is not always the model — far from it. Overall crime rates there are still vastly higher than in Ireland. But ponder just one statistic: firearms deaths in Britain are a massive 15 times lower than in France and 40 times lower than in the United States. That’s hardly coincidental.

Homicide rates strongly suggest that routinely arming ordinary police has the effect of ratcheting up gun crime levels, not lowering them.

Still not convinced? Well, for all the hysteria, just take a look at the garda roll of honour — the list of those who have died in the course of duty. It is distinguished and it is short.

In the past 20 years, just three names have been added: Sergeant Paul Reid, who died on UN duty in Sarajevo; Garda Jerry McCabe, manslaughtered by IRA men, the court decided; and Garda Andrew Callinan who died trying to save the life of a deranged man who had poured petrol over himself and set it alight.

In other words, while the New York and Los Angeles police rolls lengthened almost every year, only once in this generation has a garda been shot dead on Irish soil. Gun crime is escalating, yes, but it is also still comparatively rare. This is not the time to be panicked into a once-and-for-all measure. Talking of rolls of honour, it’s worth remembering that if one was to list the names of the RUC members killed during the recent Troubles, I would still be at it long after my 1,200 words were up. Contrary to what is often said, members of the PSNI are not routinely armed either: they merely have the option to carry weapons for their own protection. Increasingly, they are choosing not to.

Wouldn’t it be ironic then if the gardaí started upping their firepower just as the PSNI — who still look on enviously at the levels of consent afforded to their southern counterparts — were ditching theirs?

ARMING the uniformed gardaí will simply create — or reinforce — the sense of detachment and distance between them and the people in the communities they serve. This is not some nebulous threat of the sort dreamt up in university social science departments. Countries that have gone down the armed route frequently come to regret it.

It is simplistic to suggest that the gardaí need firearms to put them on a level playing field with gun-toting criminals. Where does it end when both sides — those in the right as well as those in the wrong — have bazookas slung over their shoulders?

Those on the frontline know that arming every garda will not cause the narcotics barons to surrender and will merely encourage them to redouble their armouries. Quite simply, an armed criminal confronted by an armed officer is more likely to kill before he is killed. And if he is high as a kite on illicit substances, he will kill all the quicker.

Any true drug lord worthy of the name, though, doesn’t actually snort or inject the rubbish himself, of course. He behaves quite rationally, in his own terms. He knows the likely sentence for possessing a gun is lower than for being caught trafficking heroin or crack cocaine.

It follows that we won’t break their grip and their resort to guns until the penalties for weapon and drug possession are brought more into line — and increased.