The announcement yesterday that Dublin Bus is to deploy security personnel on its fleet of busses, as they traverse the parts of Dublin City where anti-social behaviour is rampant, was I thought a good example of what some satirists refer to as How Ireland Works.
In some ways, it would be churlish and unfair to criticise politicians for responding to a real problem. Indeed, here are three of them, announcing said response to that problem with what one could generously call a fanfare:
It is not, on the other hand, either churlish or unfair to wonder why the politicians can put a sticking plaster over the problem but seem incapable of addressing the problem itself.
The problem here, for the avoidance of doubt, is not that there were no security guards on Dublin Bus. The problem is that the state needs security guards for busses in the capital city because crime and anti-social behaviour in that capital city is so rampant. Putting security guards on busses may – may – move some of that anti-social behaviour off the busses, but it will not eliminate it or reduce it overall.
One of the things that stands to benefit politicians – especially those already in office – during an election time is the public’s short memory. It was just over 14 months ago that Justice Minister Helen McEntee took her short walk through Store Street in the aftermath of a vicious assault on an American tourist, in which she said that Dublin was a safe city and that she, for one, would feel safe walking its streets at night. Evidently, were that true, then yesterday’s announcement that burly men would patrol busses to keep the public safe would not have been necessary.
Indeed, busses, in a safe city, would be one of the safest places to be. They are the definition of a public place, usually filled with witnesses and observers and where any crime that a person committed would be both seen by the public and recorded by the onboard security cameras. The fact that additional security is needed on busses is not a solution to the problem, but proof of how bad the problem has gotten. If you need additional security on busses, then we can surmise that the anti-social behaviour is coming from people who have no fear of any consequences for their behaviour or their criminality.
It is difficult for a law-abiding citizen, I think, to understand the sheer contempt for authority that is experienced by an Irish criminal, or an Irish perpetrator of anti-social behaviour. Most of us are raised to fear the Gardai, or to worry about the consequences if we are arrested or charged with a crime. Deterrence keeps us on the straight and narrow, which is why laws directed at law-abiding middle-class people tend to be mostly observed. The Garda Traffic division, for example, still inspires in most of us a fear of flashing blue lights in the rear-view mirror.
But what if you are, by contrast, a gurrier with 75 previous convictions? What can the Gardai or the state do to you that might deter you from future low-level criminality? It is the very people who most need to be deterred by the criminal justice system who have come to learn, over the past twenty years or so, that they can safely regard it as a joke.
This is a problem that can only be solved by deterrence, and by imposing a real criminal and social cost on behaviours that the state and its people would like to see stamped out. Were politicians serious about this, then they would recognise that the current system is failing to deliver, in any way, such deterrence.
Security guards, of course, are a form of deterrence but not of the criminal justice kind. The most that one might hope is that a perpetrator might see a large and burly man on a bus in uniform and decide that anti-social behaviour isn’t worth it this time – though I suspect some groups of youths will see this more as a challenge than a deterrent. In any case, the deterrent is short-term: If they get arrested, the long-term consequences will be the same suspended sentences, short stretches, and fines that they’ve always been.
The only proven way of reducing crime is to incarcerate criminals in large numbers. It is a strategy so simple and so obvious – and with such a compelling record of success – that our leaders appear to think it is not sophisticated enough for Ireland. There is almost an attitude in the Irish legal and academic world that putting people in prison for lengthy stays is backwards, and that rehabilitation is the only useful objective.
Of course, this works for everyone except the public: Soft sentencing is good for criminal barristers – as one put it to me after the death of a particularly committed petty criminal, “it’s a sad day, he was worth three indictable matters a year”. Soft sentencing is good for a whole array of NGOs and rehabilitation workers and therapists, who have a steady supply of court-ordered clients. Soft sentencing is good for the poverty industry, for whom rampant crime in an area is evidence of “deprivation” and “disadvantage”, rather than state failure to enforce the law and order of the land.
While this industry reliant on soft sentencing and rampant criminality continues, putting security guards on busses is just a sticking plaster. How long before the first case of a security guard being assaulted comes before the courts? Six months, I reckon. Which is longer by some distance than the sentence the perpetrator will receive.