Why we must resist pressure for an armed police force

As the countdown to Christmas starts in earnest, here’s the good news. The new Garda Commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, is committed to maintaining the Gardai as an unarmed force. I know. It doesn’t seem like much of a cause for celebration, but that’s the way things are around here. In a situation where the lunatics have taken over the asylum, you have to be thankful for small mercies.

There has been an abundance of hysteria and hype on the subject of law and order over the past few years, here in Ireland. Among the themes that have emerged in media coverage of the issue is the idea that the Gardai need to be armed to deal with the increasing prevalence of guns on the streets.
But they don’t. The vast majority of Gardai do not come into contact with dangerous criminals on a day-to-day basis. They deal with the mundane problems that are inescapable in a complex, modern society – from traffic offences, through petty theft to complaints about (so-called) anti-social behaviour, and so on.
This is not to make light of the work they do. I don’t quite know what inspires people to join the force in the first place, and I always feel that it is an odd choice of career: personally, I’d never have the stomach for getting involved in the process of putting ordinary, decent criminals behind bars. I’d always be too aware of the way in which society conspires against individuals, especially those who come from an under-privileged background. There’d be no satisfaction in it for me – primarily, I guess, because I have no faith in the consensus. Dylan got it about right in ‘Idiot Wind’: “What’s good is bad/What’s bad is good/You’ll find out when you reach the top/You’re on the bottom”… Everything’s a little upside down. The rules are made to protect the interests of the few. In the context, it hardly makes sense to blame those who buck them.
In the current issue of Hot Press, we feature an interview with a low-level cannabis dealer. My own reaction to reading it was to understand immediately why he got into selling drugs.
As the bard said, on a different occasion, when you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose. The dealer sees nothing morally wrong with selling what is a relatively innocuous drug* – and there are hundreds of thousands of consumers in this country who obviously agree with him. It’s a way of earning a crust for someone who has no qualifications, no work and no prospects. And so, his only concern is that the cops might get wind of it and give him hassle or stick him in jail.
I’m far too busy to bother my arse with dope. But I still feel that he has a point. When the law is an ass, there is no good reason not to break it. It’s what gay men did until homosexual acts between consenting adults were de-criminalised. And they were right to fuck as they saw fit, rather than buckling under to the bigoted consensus. Indeed that is precisely what conscientious citizens frequently do, as a matter of principle, when the believe a law is wrong or unjust. It’s what they should do.
In truth the dealer is in it for the money, but he also believes that the law that makes it a criminal offence to sell cannabis is absurd and wrong. So he breaks the law. Do I blame him? No. I can’t put myself in his position and say I’d do the same thing. But I don’t for a minute believe that I’d ever have felt comfortable being in a position to arrest, judge or jail him.
All of that said, however, that the Gardai do good and necessary work is beyond question.
To take one example, last week, a man was arrested across the road from Whelan’s Bar in Camden Street. He was carrying an AK47 – a killer assault rifle – in a hold-all. The individual, according to reports, was a former Republican terrorist, turned mercenary hit-man. Where he was going and what grisly business he was about to conclude has not been revealed – and the Gardai may or may not have known. But that an ordinary, unarmed, uniformed patrol successfully stopped him on the street, apprehended him and took him out of (other people’s) harm’s way says a lot about what good police work can achieve. Put it this way: there’s at least one lucky fucker alive today who’d otherwise have been starring in his own funeral this week.
Carrying out that kind of work takes a certain amount of raw courage: what if Mr.AK47 had sensed that he was about to be arrested and panicked? What if he had opened fire? Numerous gardai have been blown away in the course of their work.
Would I be capable of confronting a man with an assault rifle? I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is good that there are people out there who are willing to do it, on behalf of all those people who would never dream of picking up a gun, even less ever thinking of using one.
But that does not mean that all Gardai need to be armed. On the contrary, it is of great psychological importance that members of the force should continue to walk the streets without guns hanging from their belts. The thrust of public policy should be to ensure that the use of guns never becomes acceptable. To arm the Gardai as a force would be to concede defeat on that core issue. And besides, the more guns in use, the greater the number of mistakes that would be made. Remember Abbeylara..
And now for the bad news. In a new measure that was announced last week, all so called ‘foreign nationals’ coming from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) to live in the Republic of Ireland will, from next year, have their finger prints taken and stored on a Garda database, along with criminals and asylum seekers. This provision is contained in the Immigration Bill, and the new e7 million print database was launched by the Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan with the Garda Commissioner last week.
If the refusal to capitulate to demands to arm the Gardai is a measure of a residual sense of proportion, the decision to force immigrants to allow their fingerprints to be taken is the flip side of the same coin. It says to outsiders – and to Irish citizens – that we are a fundamentally suspicious tribe, obsessed with the horribly unpleasant business of tracking, monitoring and accumulating information on people, the vast majority of whom have never done – and will never do – any harm to their fellow citizens. That it is deeply ‘unchristian’ goes without saying. Especially around Christmas, much lip service is paid to the notion that we are a Christian people – but the truth is that no one gives a fuck about what all of that was supposed to mean.
It is about time we acknowledged it, that’s all.