THE Minister for Justice Helen McEntee recently launched a ‘safety plan’ for Dublin’s north inner city, involving the deployment of ‘community safety wardens’.
The Dublin North Inner City Local Community Safety Plan aims to tackle drug dealing, street crime, and dumping.
It has been hailed by many as a positive initiative, but there is confusion about the role of the wardens. Some are under the impression that they will be tackling criminals and walking the beat armed with pepper spray.
That’s not the case. If the scheme is properly resourced, it could be great for Dublin, but that’s a big ‘if’.
It worked well in Cork when it was introduced back in 2008, and was based on the theory of the ‘broken window’ - a crime prevention philosophy that has inspired many police forces across the world to police their jurisdictions in a certain way.
The theory suggests that if you deal with the minor offences as they arise, you will make it difficult for the more serious crimes to get a foothold.
If, for example, you have a vacant house in an estate with a few broken windows as a result of anti-social behaviour, they should be fixed as soon as possible. If the problem is ignored and the windows are not repaired, it encourages further vandalism.
The same theory applies to litter and rubbish. Where rubbish is dumped in an area and nothing is done about it, the problem escalates. The amount of litter increases because there is an impression that it is acceptable. But when remedial action is taken as soon as possible, it discourages bad behaviour.
The message is simple; deal with the small stuff and the bigger stuff won’t become a problem.
That kind of engagement between gardaí, the community and the local authority works, but putting it into practice requires resources.
It was very successful in Cork until the cutbacks kicked in.
The Dublin initiative will struggle too, unless it is adequately resourced, and there are mixed messages coming from the capital in that regard.
Minister McEntee and the Garda Commissioner continue to insist that everything is fine in the world of policing. They say they have adequate resources to police the city effectively.
The problem is nobody believes them anymore.
As a retired member of An Garda Siochana, it shouldn’t really bother me what the Department of Justice or the senior garda management get up to these days, but it does. Especially when they’re not being straight with us, and they haven’t been for a while.
Back when they closed the rural garda stations, the then Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said the key objective was to promote the more efficient and effective deployment of resources.
She said garda management had concluded that resources could be better deployed and more effectively used on the front-line if those stations no longer had to be staffed and maintained.
The Garda Commissioner at the time, Nóirín O’Sullivan, went along with it and we know how that worked out.
Gardai are no longer visible in those communities and the sad thing is, it was entirely predictable.
Decimating community policing was another move with obvious consequences. When you remove the engagement between the police and the community, something else will fill the void. Enter the far-right brigade.
Community engagement has a proven track record in this jurisdiction. The backbone of a stable policing environment, it was embraced by An Garda Siochana for decades. Identifying problems and working together to find solutions. A simple, uncomplicated system.
But it requires manpower, feet on the beat, and when they are removed, the system fails.
Whether the decline in the number of gardaí on the street is down to cutbacks, modernisation, reorganisation, or restructuring, the result is the same - the system breaks.
The Government response to the recent problem in Dublin has been to fire money at it. Plenty of overtime for gardaí to ensure a visible presence in the capital over the Christmas period. Extra resources drafted into the city with a promise that nothing like the latest unrest will ever happen again. At least, not until the overtime runs out.
With all the attention being focused on Dublin, I can’t help wondering, how well prepared the rest of the major cities and towns around the country are in the event of a sudden outbreak of disorder?
If the far-right hooligans decide to take their rampage on a nationwide tour, who will defend the streets beyond the M50?
The Dublin Metropolitan Region has the largest piece of the pie when it comes to garda resources, but reinforcements from as far away as Sligo and Waterford were still needed to supplement their numbers when the trouble flared.
They needed all the help they could get. How would rural gardaí cope in a similar situation?
It was reassuring to hear the garda chief superintendent for the Cork City Division say the city will not be exposed from a security or policing perspective following the reassignment of several gardaí from Cork to the capital in the wake of the Dublin riots.
He gave that assurance at a recent meeting of the Joint Policing Committee, after news that some gardaí with public order training had been reassigned to bolster the capital’s policing capabilities.
Sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul to me, and that’s why I worry about the future of policing in this country - I don’t see any evidence of a plan.
The current garda commissioner seems to be focused on enforcement, discipline regulations and oversight, which is understandable given that he came from a jurisdiction where a more militarised style of policing was the order of the day.
But it’s not working here, so let’s get back to what we do best - engaging with the community.
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