With over 200 recommendations for the reform of how the Garda investigates crime, what the Garda Inspectorate’s report is proposing would fashion a new police force for the Republic.
However, the head of the Inspectorate, Chief Inspector Bob Olson, has conceded the reform package would take years and that even the information technology needed would likely cost in the region of €40 million.
Some of the key recommendations that will occupy the next Garda Commissioner include:
The under-recording of crime was almost 40 per cent in sample cases studied. The Inspectorate said the issue needed to be addressed with great urgency. Otherwise crime data would be wrong, criminals would not be caught, victims would not be helped and resources would not be deployed properly.
Some specialist units like the Garda National Drugs Unit and Organised Crime Unit could be amalgamated.
The Inspectorate disagreed with Garda policy that all members should be able to investigate crimes as serious as rape, saying a victim-centred approach needed to be taken by specially trained gardaí. A similar approach needed to be taken to the investigation of domestic violence.
None of the 1,500 Garda members interviewed could recall investigating a racially based or homophobic crime and had never recorded such an incident. Details of a racial or homophobic crime needed to be recorded as such on Pulse.
Teams specialising in the investigation of serious crime and gathering intelligence should be developed in all divisions.
Many text alert and other community-based crime prevention schemes worked well.
The Inspectorate recommended the Garda conduct an analysis of crime hot spots nationally to identify those areas where schemes were needed most.
The review of new rosters introduced in April needed to be completed quickly. The rosters were not working.
The Garda needed to brief teams of personnel coming on duty, give them intelligence-driven tasks and provide the intelligence to them, and then de-brief them properly.
Weakness in a new performance management system being developed by the Garda have already been flagged by the Inspectorate because the system would not hold to account those gardaí who were underperforming and “do very little”. Instead, a model that held people to account needed to be developed.
The Inspectorate recommended the introduction of an electronic system that could record all of the calls into the force and the responses to them in order to build a date map of where and when resources are most needed and so provide the best service possible.
One number should be maintained for emergency calls and a separate number advertised for the public to make non-emergency calls in order to make reaction times to emergencies much faster.
Changing the narrative of a crime on PULSE needed to be much more tightly controlled, audited and even prohibited to control the declassification of crimes to other more minor offences.
In order to improve rates of recording of crime, an enforced target of 95 per cent compliance rate with using the Garda Information Services Centre; a facility in Castlebar that takes calls from gardaí in the field and creates PULSE records from them based on the details they supply from a scene or at the end of a shift.
When the Garda Information Services Centre questioned how crimes were being classified, in a very significant number of cases Garda members simply ignored the questions and sidestepped the oversight they represented. The Inspectorate said robust internal governance in this area needed to be developed.
The Inspectorate said the Garda Information Services Centre was a very effective office providing a first rate service and that it should make the final decision in classifying a crime.
The Central Statistics Office, which collates crime data on the basis of information supplied by the Garda, should be supplied with all records from PULSE, including non-crime incidents. This would help safeguard the integrity of official crime data and provide oversight. Decision-makers on crime reclassification needed to be appointed across all divisions and an outside agency should provide an audit function.
Meetings should be held daily in all Garda divisions to ensure accountability on the proper investigation of crime and the tasking of frontline members. This would bring structure to the very different ways in which senior officers manage their charges from place to place and unit to unit.
All detectives should be taken away from non-investigative work such as providing cash escorts for movements of cash, conducting armed checkpoints and conducting armed patrols. Instead of armed detectives patrolling in urban areas, especially Dublin, the Regional Support Units already in operation as rapid reaction teams outside the capital should be used in Dublin.
