Tackling crime - Community project a good start

Relations between wayward youngsters and the Garda Síochána are often a charade in which antisocial behaviour in defying the gardaí becomes a means of achieving social status in communities where relations with the gardaí are adversarial.

Resolving conflict involves people on each side of a problem understanding each other. Even within a family, relations will inevitably become dysfunctional if the authority figure is considered intolerant. This is all the more so within a community if the authorities are seen as the enemy.

Bitterness towards gardaí is a recipe for trouble within any community. Some gardaí will dismiss suggestions that they should try to understand and help antisocial elements to be more responsible as just “nanny state” nonsense.

In 2006 the gardaí realised that the same children were in court regularly. If they had checked they would probably have found that one of other of the parents of those children were regularly in court when they were around the same age. The first place to tackle this problem was with the current young offenders.

A pilot programme was set up to deal with 16 of the most prolific juvenile offenders in 2006. They had been responsible for 219 offences. A garda was appointed to act as a case manager for each of the individuals and that garda dealt with all charges against that person, regardless of where the offence occurred.

The garda took on the job of interacting with both the youth’s family and the various agencies. The aim was to engineer those youths out of the criminal justice system and remove them from the path of crime.

It is imperative that role models within any community should be seen as responsible individuals, rather than irresponsible criminal elements. For each one turned on to the path of social responsibility, it means their harmful influence on other youths is reversed. This could help to break the vicious antisocial and criminal cycle that is frequently passed in families from one generation to the next.

Within nine months, the number of offences had dropped by 64%. The most positive aspect of the programme was the impact that this reduction had on the community involved in the experiment. The whole thing was seen as such a success that it was expanded to adult offenders in January 2009 and to sex offenders in March of that year in the north central area of Dublin.

Chief Superintendent Pat Leahy of Store Street Garda Station contends that there was a 17% drop in the crime rate in the area last year, and he attributes this to the case management system. Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy has now authorised the expansion of the scheme to Cork, Limerick, Donegal and Galway.

The primary role of gardaí should be seen as crime prevention, with detection a secondary function necessitated by the failure of the primary role. The community justice approach deserves to be warmly welcomed for its crime prevention potential.