Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan wants to give the Gardai power to stop and search people who they suspect might be carrying knives, he has said.
The irony in his position is that the same Gardai who will be tasked under such a law with stopping and searching those potentially carrying deadly weapons is that the searchers themselves will be – as has always been a point of pride for the Irish police force – unarmed.
When last I wrote about arming the Gardai, some years ago, I received an understandable wave of pushback from readers. Some readers were proud of Ireland’s tradition of unarmed policing. Others were of the view that arming Gardai would inevitably lead to abuses of power by police officers. Others were more forceful, pointing out that if Gardai had been so freely willing to spray pepper spray in the face of my colleague Fatima last year, in the course of her duties, what might they do if they had handguns in their holsters? American cops, who routinely carry weapons, have certainly been known to discharge them when other less lethal options were open to them.
These are legitimate concerns.
At the same time, I find it impossible not to have sympathy with the position that our cops have been placed in by Irish politicians over a number of years. I am not talking here about “political policing”, or the actions of Gardai at protests, or indeed what court orders senior Gardai seek.
I am talking about the average Garda, on the beat.
It is simply a statement of fact to say that policing low-level thuggery in Ireland has become an almost pointless task. The streets are full of people who are wandering around freely despite having been convicted of dozens of crimes: The Gardai arrest and detain a person over a common assault. That person goes to court and gets the probation act, or a suspended sentence. He is back on the street next week, with the conviction statistics having had another number added to them, but the streets no safer in practice. One Garda a year or so ago told me that he had arrested and secured 15 convictions against the same youth – each time the courts let the gurrier in question go with a rap on the knuckles.
One consequence of this system of policing is that for many young habitual criminals like that youth, any fear of Gardai has gone. They understand the system just as well as you or I do – being arrested and charged might be a drag and an inconvenience, but as that same Garda said to me “it’s no different to them than saving and re-loading a computer game, they just hit the re-set button and go again with the aim not to get caught next time”.
In this sense, O’Callaghan’s decision to award stop and search powers is to be welcomed from a policing point of view in that it at least gives the cops the power to do something pro-active, which is to actively remove weapons from the streets without relentless judicial oversight. The problem though remains: It’s not as if a person who loses a knife cannot just pick up a new one, often at home.
Ultimately, the state can do nothing to stop crime – especially the kind of low-level knife crime that now plagues our streets – without a police force that is both strong and respected, those two words being another word for “feared”.
In that sense, I just do not think stop and search is enough.
If it is the policy of the state to deter crime, then the presence of Gardai on the streets must actually be a deterrent. This is the fallacy that often dominates Irish politics, where opposition TDs call for “more Gardai on the street” as the solution to rising crime levels.
But if young offenders do not respect or fear the Gardai, why should they change their views just because there are more Gardai than before? Whether one Garda arrests you, or whether you are swarmed by ten Gardai, makes no ultimate difference if the sanction provided by the courts is the probation act or a suspended sentence. You have the exact same level of impunity as you had before.
This is why I think the state – if it is not going to build prisons and detain these people – needs to give them another reason to be fearful when they see a cop on the beat.
In the days before human rights lawyers – god bless them – existed, there were tales of Gardai picking crooks up off the street, administering some rough justice, and then letting them go. I am not endorsing this particular brand of policing, but I would argue that it was probably more effective than what we have now.
All I am saying is that it doesn’t matter how many cops you have, or what powers of search and seizure you give them, if criminals understand that getting caught is just a case of save-scumming, but in real life.