Report calls for suite of changes in policing

The Future of Policing in Ireland report has thrown up a range of ‘issues’ that could see proposals get stuck or even sink in the resultant quagmire, says Cormac O’Keeffe.

As people get to read the Policing Commission’s report and start to digest its contents, obvious ‘issues’ are going to jump out. And issues in the world of policing reform can mutate into a quagmire, where proposals may get stuck or sink.

Four immediate issues pop out.

MULTI-AGENCY TEAMS

The Future of Policing in Ireland report places a new focus on community policing or what it calls district policing.

This includes a broader definition beyond policing to ‘community safety’.

Part of this will be the imperative of ‘harm prevention’, including providing services to people with mental health and addiction conditions, homeless people, children, the elderly, and others at risk.

The report says vulnerable people are too often the victims of crime — sexual and physical abuse, trafficking, exploitation, fraud, stalking, harassment, and hate crimes.

The report envisages bringing other State agencies into the responsibility of ensuring community safety and calls for new legislation to enable this.

It says analysis abroad indicates a “relatively small number of families and individuals” account for a disproportionate amount of time and resources of State agencies and that integrated teams are best to respond to this.

The commission has dusted down a recommendation in a joint Mental Health Commission and An Garda Síochána report, dated 2009, calling for crisis intervention teams.

It says it is “regrettable” that, nine years on, these out-of-hour teams of police, health, and social workers have still not been set up.

Its recommendation for such teams, and for co-location of police and social services, will hit the same problems that have bedevilled similar proposals, which include the sharing of information between agencies, and been repeated by various inquiries in clerical child sexual abuse and by the Garda Inspectorate, as seen in its most report this year, Responding to Child Sexual Abuse.

Given the demands and backlog of cases, and shortages of staff, faced by Tusla, the child and family agency, and similar problems facing the HSE, not to mention the gardaí, this is major problem number one.

It will involve a major investment in resources to the relevant agencies — which requires extra Government funding. Not reallocation of funding from other key areas, but new, additional money.

DISMISSED FROM COURT

A radical recommendation is that “all prosecution decisions” should be taken away from gardaí and that the practice of police prosecuting cases — which happens in district courts up and down the country — should cease.

It says these massively intensive duties should be taken up by an expanded State solicitor system or a national prosecution service.

It documents the reasons why, which are all sound: It is not the sergeant’s job to prosecute, they are not trained, and not trained to the level of the defence (which could have a senior counsel).

On an important point of principle and practice, it says investigations and prosecutions should be separate.

In addition, it says:

“The involvement of gardaí in prosecutions and the amount of time they spend in court or preparing for court is enormously wasteful of police resources that should be deployed on core police duties.”

Similar concerns and recommendations apply to the role gardaí play at inquests, which are “time-consuming” for officers and for which they are not trained. It notes the Government’s “long-standing” commitment to reform the inquest process.

While the report states its case well (bearing in mind the Garda Inspectorate has flagged such concerns many years ago), it will require political will and a massive investment in staffing and resources for either State solicitors or the DPP.

Linked to this, the report calls for a whole host of duties to be taken away from gardaí.

These include: Security at courts, transporting all remand prisoners, serving summonses, attending minor road traffic accidents, and safeguarding examination papers.

It says gardaí are also involved in verifying passport applications and even the opening of new bank accounts.

It says action to remove gardaí from these functions “should be taken immediately” and that these non-core duties should be “reassigned to other agencies”. Moreover, it says this should be one of the first priorities on the implementation programme.

It says the Courts Service and the Irish Prison Service would need to take up the relevant duties. That means extra staff and funding.

In addition, the Garda’s remaining role in immigration duties should be transferred to the Department of Justice’s Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service.

All of which means massive funding battles with the Department of Public Expenditure and all sorts of painful and protracted negotiations with unions and staff associations.

POWER STRUGGLES

This is an area that has caused some surprise and indeed shock. It is also the only area in the entire report where there was an internal split, with two of the 11 members (Vicky Conway and Eddie Molloy) expressing an objection to a key proposal regarding changes to structures. That minority view is in the small print on page 59.

The commission has recommended a new Garda Síochána Board, similar to a board of directors, be set up to provide internal governance over the commissioner and to support the commissioner.

This body will have a non-executive chair, appointed by the Government, and members from business and professional sectors, supported by a secretariat.

This recommendation is to go along with a significant expansion in the powers of the commissioner — to make him both a police chief and a chief executive officer (with control over finance, HR, and the police estate).

The report calls for the commissioner to have the power to appoint his or her own “leadership team” — and that this responsibility should be removed from the Policing Authority.

This is despite the authority only recently being given the job, in part to bring independence, fairness, and transparency to the process.

Staff associations have long believed favouritism and nepotism dominate promotions. (The Policing Authority and Garda Inspectorate are to merge into a new Policing and Community Safety Oversight Commission.)

The report says the board will oversee the new appointments process.

The board will also muscle into the Policing Authority’s role in devising policing priorities, plans, and strategies.

The board also assumes overall responsibility for management of the police budget and resources. It now will nominate people to the Government for the roles of Garda commissioner and deputy commissioner (previously held by the Policing Authority).

The commission, chaired by Kathleen O’Toole, a police chief in various parts of the US, says it wants to clearly demark lines of governance (board), oversight (Policing and Community Safety Oversight Commission), and accountability (justice minister, Oireachtas).

As it stands, the Policing Authority holds at least four public meetings with the commissioner and his or her team. Commissioner meetings with the board would not be in public.

In addition to complicating, possibility unhinging, the oversight structure, these changes would mean the commissioner will now be surrounded by more bodies to answer to: the board, oversight commission, the minister, and Oireachtas committees. (Under separate proposals, he will also have a new national security co-ordinator, effectively adviser to the Taoiseach, over him, though the power relationship there is as yet unclear).

Ms O’Toole has made the establishment of the Garda board one of the top four priorities, so it will be interesting how this plays out.

REFORM LOGJAM

The commission acknowledges that other reports (containing hundreds and hundreds of recommendations) have come before it, most notably in the reform blueprints contained in two massive landmark reports of the Garda Inspectorate (2014’s Crime Investigation and 2015’s Changing Policing in Ireland).

That was followed in 2016 with the five-year Garda Modernisation and Renewal Programme, which the Government agreed would the implementation mechanism for the inspectorate’s recommendations.

A massive amount of time and resources have been spent on this, both internally with the gardaí and externally in the authority trying to monitor the progress. One of the major initiatives in that, the creation of a divisional policing model, subsuming the districts under it, is being piloted in three Garda divisions and it is government policy to roll out nationwide.

We have a new blueprint in town — the commission’s report — and a soon-to-be-appointed new sheriff in town in the report’s powerful implementation group.

The report says the commission was “emphatically not our view” that the report “should be superimposed upon all that has gone before”.

It adds:

“Many recommendations from previous reports may still be relevant, but some will not and others will need reassessment and modification”.

It says all outstanding recommendations from previous reports should now be viewed through the “lens” of its report.

That sounds easy — it’s anything but.

First, who is going to assess what previous recommendations should be jettisoned, what should remain and what should be modified? How are they going to do that?

It would appear the implementation group, but it would also have to involve the Policing Authority, which has been monitoring the implementation, and the commissioner and his team, who have been doing the implementing. And what does “through the lens” mean in practice?

One of the jobs will be to determine how the new ‘district policing model’ the commission recommends fits with the ‘divisional policing model’ being piloted. While they seem to contradict each other, elements of the commission’s district model is within a super divisional model, including divisional detective and specialist teams. But things could get bogged down here.

All of which means a lot more heavy lifting to be done before implementation begins.