Why the call for more gardaí won't solve problems of violence and anti-social behaviour
Ireland has more police per head of population than the United States, England & Wales, Australia or New Zealand. File photo: Mark Stedman/RollingNews.ie
A week ago, a tourist was injured in an alleged violent assault in the centre of Dublin, close to the city's biggest Garda station.
The public discussion related to several incidents in the capital of late has now joined a long-running debate, which began to (re-)emerge in the mid-2010s, about crime and safety within the capital, particularly the north inner city.
It is not entirely clear if street violence has recently increased within the city. This is partly because of the specific unreliability of Garda crime data, and the more general unreliability of police-reported crime statistics. Victim surveys provide the most accurate ‘picture’ of crime and violence in our state. Unfortunately, the Irish State has not routinely undertaken victim surveys.
It seems unlikely that we are at the levels of street violence experienced in Ireland in the 1990s and early 2000s. During this period, Celtic Tiger-funded increases in alcohol consumption and a vibrant nightclub scene made Irish towns and cities relatively dangerous places. In 2023, late-night venues are few and far between, and young people consume less alcohol compared to previous generations.
Despite these uncertainties about the reality of crime and violence, people’s perceptions of risk on Dublin’s streets have changed, for the worse.
At least some of the increase in perceived insecurity is likely driven by the highly visible combination of homelessness (now at historically high levels) and the closely related issue of street drug use in the inner city. Smartphones and social media platforms have also made what street violence is occurring hyper-visible to people who rarely frequent Dublin’s north inner city.
Whatever the basis for these perceptions of insecurity, they have produced a predictable range of unhelpful responses from our political system.
The response by Ireland’s political system to highly publicised incidents of street violence has been remarkably consistent (if not universal, as we saw in the case of the attack on Alanna Quinn Idris). In the aftermath of incidents which have garnered national media attention, politicians at both a national and local level usually call for some combination of 'more gardaí' and 'tougher sentences’.
Governments normally respond by committing to meeting these demands.
There are problems with both demands, but I will focus on just one: more gardaí.
Ireland is not a particularly under-policed state, if we take that to mean 'how many cops are employed?'.
Ireland has more police per head of population than the United States, England & Wales, Australia or New Zealand (we have fewer police than Northern Ireland for clear historical reasons). Ireland also has more police than Nordic states.
Ireland does not experience radically higher levels of crime and violence than these states. We are a comparatively safe jurisdiction.
Despite this, we are told An Garda Síochána (AGS) is chronically under-resourced and incapable of responding to Irish crime and safety problems. Why is this the case?
Ignoring the fact that we simply cannot police our way out of some crime and insecurity problems, part of the issue is rooted in the extraordinarily slow process of civilianisation in AGS.
Civilianisation means recruiting people into a police force to do work that does not require a police officer to do. Typically, this is work police are not trained to do. Often they are not particularly good at it. Civilianisation is, in part, designed to increase and improve the quality of police resources.
Most modern professional police forces embraced civilianisation decades ago. In Ireland, this process only really began in the 2000s, and progress has been slow (for example, civilians make up 40–50% of police forces in England, and just 19% in Ireland).
Part of the delay in civilianising was, I believe, rooted in AGS’s institutional hostility to outsiders (i.e. non-sworn officers): a feature of Garda management culture that was highlighted in most of the organisation’s scandals.
Compared to other police forces in comparable jurisdictions, AGS is a notably closed and non-transparent organisation. Opening AGS up to those not acculturated through Templemore was no doubt perceived as a threat to the existing order.
Another glaringly obvious part of the problem is that AGS does not have a handle on the problems it is tasked to address. Again, unlike modern police in comparable jurisdictions, AGS does not practice evidence-based policing.
Part of the reason for this is that AGS does not produce much data on how it is using its own powers and resources. What little data they do produce, is of a very poor standard. An organisation cannot know how best to use its resources if it does not understand its capacity.
AGS is also remarkably averse to publicising what data it does have: a hallmark of an organisational culture fearful of scrutiny. Maurice McCabe showed us this fear often takes a particularly toxic form in AGS.
Similarly, AGS does not have a handle on the reality of crime problems in the community. This failure is better known, as the CSO has for a number of years publicly stated Garda crime data is not reliable.
Evidence from international policing practice shows that ‘high visibility’ 'hotspot policing' can reduce certain kinds of crime—e.g. some kinds of street violence. More recent evidence suggests that these strategies do not just move some forms of crime elsewhere: the crime stops. If done well, this strategy might be successful in reducing street violence.
For other types of crime, such as drug offending, evidence shows that hotspot policing just moves the offending elsewhere, and can lead to more unsafe drug use, leading to worse outcomes. Again, we cannot police our way out of some of our crime/social issues.
So, it is possible that some of the perceived problems in Dublin’s north inner city could be addressed by targeted policing strategies. However, in order to operationalise such strategies, police organisations need to accurately understand where the problems are and what their own policing capacities are.
It is not clear that AGS have good enough information in either respect to do this.
Ultimately the responsibility for AGS lies with the political system. Unfortunately, the political agendas in the field of crime and policing is usually crude and cynical. AGS has been slow to modernise and professionalise, because the political system has little interest in, or understanding of, how that might be achieved.
The predictable and reactive call by politicians for ‘more gardaí’ exemplifies the impoverished quality of discourse around crime and policing in Ireland. There is no mention of investing in the significant number of gardaí we actually have, hiring better within the organisation, or in developing organisational capacity within AGS to use its resources better.
- Dr Cian Ó Concubhair, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the School of Law and Criminology in Maynooth University
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