Police Academy

What’s going on with the cops?
A good police force is one of the bedrocks of a modern civil society. The force has to be demonstrably answerable to the civil authority, it has to be believed to be trustworthy and it has to be seen to be effective. Citizens can draw great comfort if these three elements are in place. And if they’re not, well you’ve got trouble.

And how do the Garda Síochána measure up against these three yardsticks?
Let’s agree to separate the individual from the collective. Many of us know cops who are straight-up four-be-twos. But equally, we know individuals who have had bad experiences with the police. Some of us have had bad experiences ourselves.
And if you look around, there’s much to worry about.
We have a public enquiry investigating dirty deeds in Donegal. The police do not come out of this with any credit. And it’s too easy to write it off as the actions of a few miscreants. But the fish swim in the sea. These people’s misdemeanours derive from a culture that pervades the police.
We also have a court case regarding the behaviour of members of the police against a ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest. Exactly who bashed who is still to be decided as I write, but the level of complaint is consistent with other reportage.
We have a kind of slow burn assault by the Gardaí on the dance culture and now on the entertainment industry. I’m not talking about the prosecution of Fibber Magee’s. I’m talking of the opposition to late night licences, the harassment of the pubs and the like.
But even worse, we’ve had the appalling lunacy of the threats to pub owners and others who facilitated non-alcohol teenage discos. Notwithstanding what the broadsheets might think, this isn’t new.
Indeed, the history of the Blast gig in Temple Bar is a salutary one for anyone who thinks that the prevailing forces in this country have any sympathy either for adolescents or those who work with them. Meanwhile, robbers keep robbing.
But there is something far more sinister in evidence in all this. Although many Gardaí are decent dedicated public servants concerned with the public good, at an organisational level the Gardaí appear to have a completely different agenda.
As to what this might be, the jury is out. Is it to undermine the authority of the Minister for Justice? Or to get back at him for his allegations that some Gardaí had inappropriate links with tabloid journalists? Or to expose the law as an ass? Or is it a perverted attempt to ‘prevent’?
Why, for example, did minister Séamus Brennan lash out at the Gardaí in his last days as Minister for Transport? He accused them of trying to catch easy targets on motorways where very few accidents occurred. He said he was ‘browned off’ at Gardaí for their continued delay in getting a computerised penalty points system up and running… He’s not alone. The Minister for Justice has had a few gos as well.
The Gardaí might blame the management system that puts the emphasis on the achievement of specified quantitative targets and on a ‘box-ticking’ approach to management.
But they themselves have made choices that are far more important. It seems to many that the Gardaí have largely eschewed their role of law enforcers in favour of a general approach stylised as ‘prevention’ and in focusing on spin-doctoring they give us style not substance…
That mindset has infected lawmakers too. With so little meaningful enforcement there is increased reliance on the law as a frightener. Admittedly, the Gardaí are not helped by the propensity of the Minister for Justice to heavy-handed and unnecessary legislation. His huffy introduction of amendments to his own legislation on pub openings says it all.
But what most people wanted to know, and still do, was why all this new legislation was needed in the first place. Insofar as problems existed, for example with laws governing alcohol they were not to do with availability or price. They were to do with abject and utter lack of implementation.
And who should have been implementing? But because the Gardaí couldn’t be arsed about the dirty work of implementation, instead we get daft and extreme laws threatening ever more extreme sanctions.
That, by the way, is before we factor in the multitude of quasi-police functionaries like clampers, health inspectors, litter enforcers, traffic wardens and the like.
McDowell has announced the recruitment of 2000 new Gardaí over the next two years. Actually, we’re over-policed. We don’t need more policing or enforcement, we need to build a social consensus, a sense of order that derives from our own pace with ourselves. We need a new civil society.