Questions of policing raised by arrests in inner city

WITH Garda McCabe death in the service of the State so fresh in our memories it is right to acknowledge that gardai do a difficult and dangerous and often thankless job and that their bravery is never in doubt. But questions sometimes arise about the conduct of Garda operations on the ground, and it is also, if not equally, a service to the State to raise them.

Such a question has arisen among women active in community matters in the Dolphin's Barn flats complex. Josie Dwyer, the young man who was a drug addict and who was dying of AIDS, but who was nevertheless murdered recently, was murdered near Dolphin's Barn.

That night, as it happens, a group of stalwart local women, who week in week out over periods ranging from 13 years to eight months have been active in everything in the community, were at their regular anti drugs meeting. Afterwards some of them went for a drink, and most of them went home. When Investigating gardai began to call around the flats to take statements about the murder these women welcomed them.

They gave long statements, then they went about their lives. Most of them have jobs, they have families, one went on holidays, one minded a very sick child. The usual. I'm sure that there's at most complicated system of simultaneous knowing and not knowing in Dolphin's Barn, as there is in any place where people live right on top of each other but try to preserve some privacy as well. I imagine that for an outsider to get to know such a community takes the utmost patience, such as the FBI have learned to discipline themselves with in the US.

In the wake of Josie Dwyer's death what the gardai did in the eyes of the Dolphin's Barn community was this. "There were three or four cars full of detectives going around the flats all the time for 10 days or so. They'd swoop on this one and then on that one." The carloads of gardai called on one of the women four times the fourths time they arrested her.

They arrested another in the street. They arrested another in a public place, with crowds of strangers looking on. They arrested five others here and there. None of the women had ever been in a police station for anything other than a passport form before. They consider themselves respectable women.

However, they were interrogated. Where the interrogations have led or might lead it is not possible to say, as the superintendent in the area has no comment to make. But it will be interesting to assess the good that comes from this operation, compared to the bad, which is already manifest.

THE manner in which the women feel they were treated by the investigating gardai has given rise to great bitterness on their part. In future, none of the women will speak to members of the Garda except when a solicitor is present. And these are women, some of them, who have been going to Task Force meetings monthly for more than two years, along with gardai and members of the drugs squad.

They feel themselves to have been representatives of pride in the home and hope against hope for the community. "We have always tried to show our children alternative ways of dealing with boredom etc and have always tried to set high standards," they say in a statement, "and now our hard work has been completely shattered.

"Women who have worked on Task Force committees and development committees for over 10 years have now lost the respect of the children and youth in our community because of garda visits, and are confused, as gardai are talking openly to drug pushers and drug addicts and are taking statements from these people.

What the women are saying is that there was something of a balance in the community, with them and their like standing against the anarchy and lawlessness of the drug culture. And now the gardai have treated them as if they're part of that culture, as if everyone in Dolphin's Barn is. Which everyone will be, of course, if women like these give up the struggle against drugs.

After 13 years of heroin, the best of the locals who fight against drugs can hope for is to manage the problem in their very immediate environments flat block by flat block and to try to protect the old people.

But insofar as there are wider initiatives, the women who were arrested, between them, have been involved with all of them. They've worked with Dublin Corporation on housing, with Fa's on training and employment, with the Eastern Health Board on local clinics, with the local TDs and Minister on general needs. For the last few years they've had a good relationship with the Garda.

Two of the women subsequently arrested were in a delegation that went to Garda Headquarters at Harcourt Square with the local TDs and asked, begged, for a permanent police presence in Dolphin's Barn.

This appeal to the police is perfectly compatible, in a drugs ravaged community, with belonging to the Concerned Parents Against Drugs group, which some of them do. The fact that there are Sinn Fein people in that group can't forever excuse any kind of action or inaction about the drugs epidemic.

THE women have written a statement describing what they feel was the attitude displayed to them. "While at our homes, gardai made remarks on where we bought our furniture and how women prisoners would deal with us should anyone be sent to prison.

"Mature women with families were treated with no respect and the majority when questioned even at the police station had abusive language roared in their faces .. ." (There follows some very serious allegations which will be brought to the Garda Complaints Board).

The statement continues "It was how they were spoken to insinuations on how if they didn't sign statements gardai would call to their work place and ensure work colleagues were made aware why they were there. A number of statements signed by women were not read out to them and terms like blah blah and etc etc were used when calling out statements The women pause over each point. "I can't understand it," they say, almost to themselves.

Neither can I understand it. The gardai know the same as I do, that without the co-operation of these women and their like there is no future for any kind of policing in large parts of inner Dublin. They know that places like the Dolphin's Barn flats are just on the edge of complete lawlessness. Whose interests were served, I ask myself, by ostentatiously arresting some of the few people in the place who have hung on to civic mindedness?