Arm the gardaí and declare open season on gangs
This in a week when a woman police probationer was murdered in Yorkshire and the gardaí have proved impotent in the face of spiralling gun crime.
Ivana thinks it a violation of human rights that young thugs can be sent down for wearing one glove, a hood or a baseball cap. If this is a symbol of gang membership, and therefore intimidatory, then why the hell not?
In much the same way, political canvassers for (say) the British National Party could be ‘ASBOd’ and imprisoned for electioneering because the nature of their rhetoric and organisation poses a threat to the public. I say bring it on.
And lock the scum up.
Of course, there is a kernel of truth in what Ivana says. To fight crime effectively you do need to fight the causes and this no government (be it New Labour or FF/PD) can do while it supports the free market. This is what causes social exclusion and alienation, resulting in people wanting to ‘do’ drugs in the first place. It also leads to thuggery and other forms of criminal activity. But sometimes one has to be a social radical with Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke in one’s back pocket. Sometimes one has to attack violent crime with an iron fist, through punitive measures, parallel with the implementation of socially radical policies. These are such times... when society teeters on the abyss of total barbarism.
And if you don’t give the cops adequate powers to do their job, it is precisely then that vigilantism happens. We’ve had recent examples of this in Norfolk and the west of Ireland. We had it much more systematically in Northern Ireland for 30 years.
At its simplest, security forces’ collusion with loyalist paramilitaries came about because the army and RUC were not given adequate powers to smash the IRA.
On the issue of drugs, governments must indeed address themselves to the issue of why the problem exists. Probably the free market and 1960s liberal attitudes can be blamed in equal measure. One constructive solution might be a policy of controlled access through the health service, which means that drug users go to their GPs for their drugs - thereby attacking the profits of the criminals. But we would still need punitive policing to stop addicts stepping on and selling their State-supplied drugs and to smash the armed gangs on the streets - by a shoot-to-kill policy if necessary.
In fact, armed gangs should be treated like any terrorists and thus stripped of rights under law and the Geneva conventions. The correct term is unlawful combatant. This is also to say that torturing gang members to extract information is justified. Certainly, gang membership, like the dealing of class A drugs, should carry a mandatory life sentence with no parole or remission. Like rapists and paedophiles, they must die in prison.
I don’t know where Ivana Bacik lives. Dare I suggest it is a nice middle class suburb. If she lived in a deprived area she might have a different attitude to ASBOs - as do most of the working class people who live there. Open season on gangs? Armed cops? Mandatory life sentences, hanging and the birch? Bring it on! The time is long overdue.
Roger Cottrell
Queens University
Belfast
