Irish Examiner view: We need an Operation Saul on the streets of Dublin

The successful garda crackdown on antisocial behaviour and other criminal activity on public transport could be applied right around the centre of the capital

The spate of violent assaults on the streets of Dublin will require action akin to the effective policing action against crime on public transport. File picture: Brian Lawless/PA

Violent crime in Dublin

It does not seem much of a leap to consider if a plan similar to Operation Saul — a successful garda strategy to crack down on antisocial behaviour, public order incidents, and other criminal activity on Dublin’s public transport — might help protect the streets of the capital and the people on them.

Overt and covert policing on buses and on Luas, Dart, and other train services saw some 3,029 incidents being recorded on the Pulse system in the period to the end of June, but just 49 criminal charges being brought. Some 2,954 of the reported incidents were deemed “non-crime”.

Seventy-five incidents were classified as crimes under active investigation or have resulted in the people accused being brought forward to face charges in criminal courts.

There was a total of 49 cases in which charges or summonses were issued during the first six months of this year, compared with 65 for the same period last year.

Those figures indicate that the policing strategy adopted to stop criminal or antisocial behaviour on rail services is succeeding and that a co-operative venture between gardaí and transport stakeholders is reducing offence numbers.

Were a similar hands-on approach made by the gardaí, publicans, retailers, and the public at large in reaction to the spate of attacks on tourists on Dublin’s streets,    it might well be that those emboldened enough to carry out such vile crimes might be deterred.

Certainly the gardaí are to be commended for the pace at which perpetrators are being brought before the courts as a result of attacks on visitors to the city.

With the certainty that they will be swiftly and harshly dealt with, perpetrators and potential perpetrators might have second thoughts about committing these crimes in the first place.

We know that vigilance and preparedness are vital tools in preventing crime, so why not bring to the streets a model which has seen success on the public transport network?

Africa's solutions 

Major unrest across West Africa in recent weeks has seen a coup d’état in Niger as well as the breakout of fighting among rival factions in neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso.

In times past, the policing of such matters more often than not fell to those former colonists who previously ruled the territories, but now — and not before time — it appears that African nations are pulling together to try and strengthen democracies across the continent.

Nigeria's president Bola Ahmed Tinubu, left, greeting Sierra Leone's president Julius Maada Bio before last Thursday's Ecowas meeting in Abuja, Nigeria. Picture: Gbemiga Olamikan/AP

It may be a source of unease to western powers and former colonists that there is a so-called “coup belt” across the Sahel region which bisects north and sub-Saharan African; it is also a concern that the Russian Wagner group seems prevalent across the region.

For many, however, the spate of coups across the Saheel are more indicative of economic and demographic trends.

There is an emerging and growing realisation among regional organisations and heads of state that democracy must be promoted across Africa and that coups and internecine conflict can no longer be accepted as the norm, as contagion is disruptive to everyone’s ambitions for the continent.

The realisation across Africa appears now to be that former colonists such as Britain and France, as well as modern influences such as Washington and Moscow, only pursue narrow self-interests and that future stability will not be forged in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

Bullish and thuggish threats to individual countries from within will be met, as was the case in Niger, by a warning of military action from Ecowas, the Economic Community of West African States. It is a sign of a growing confidence on the continent that it can police its own turf, on its own terms and by its own agreed mechanisms.

Newspaper raid

Aggressive police actions against independent news organisations are commonplace in countries with authoritarian regimes, but seem incongruous when it comes to a smalltown newspaper in the heart of America’s Great Plains.

Last week, the local police in the small city of Marion in Kansas raided the offices of the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, a family-owned paper with a weekly circulation of about 4,000, and seized computers, servers, and
mobile phones belonging to editors and reporters.

American news agencies and newspapers co-wrote a letter of protest after the police raided the 'Marion County Record' in Kansas and seized computers and phones. File picture

Amid an outcry about press freedoms — enshrined in the First Amendment of the US constitution – the Marion police department also raided the homes of the paper’s 98-year-old owner (who later died because she was “stressed beyond her limits”) and its semi-retired editor.

Subsequently, US media organisations, including Reuters, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, penned an open letter to the police which said there appeared to be “no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search”. This was followed by the Kansas Press Association, which said the raid was an assault on “the very foundation of democracy”, and the National Newspaper Association, which described the police actions as “unthinkable” in an America that respects press freedoms.

The police action stemmed from a complaint by a local businesswoman who had been convicted of drink driving and was alleged to have been driving without a licence, who maintained the paper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents. In truth, a dispute between the woman and her estranged husband in divorce proceedings may have caused the whole furore. 

Police raids on news organisations are almost unheard of in the US, and illegal under most circumstances. That the Marion County Record had also been investigating the city’s police chief after it received information that he left his previous job to avoid repercussions from alleged sexual misconduct charges is curious.

It seems official overreach and the attempted silencing of journalistic investigative work are at play here, but the repercussions will reverberate far beyond the Great Plains.

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