No substitute for personal initiative, on or off duty

WHEN DMA East's fleet of 18 to 20 patrol cars take to the streets and roads of the division each day, the occupants have no formal contact with their local Garda stations.

The buttons which direct the progress of these cars, day and night, are pushed instead in DMA headquarters in Harcourt Square. When someone in Dublin rings 999 and asks for the gardai, this is where the call goes to Garda Command and Control.

Each of Dublin's five divisions has a despatch desk in the control centre and it is from here that the patrol cars are sent to the scene of a reported incident.

For instance, when a caller reported a suspected "pervert" watching children from a car in Sandycove just before noon yesterday, the complaint was taken in Harcourt Square. It was then passed to a despatcher, who put the call out on DMA East's Channel 9, sending a car to the scene within a minute or so.

The computer assigns each call a priority rating on a scale of one to three serious traffic accidents, bomb scares and public disturbances, for instance, are among the incident which rate priority one.

The case then remains on screen in the control centre, where all updates are reported. In the case of the alleged pervert, the controller's screen was shortly afterwards recording the patrol car's report of "gone on arrival".

If the despatched gardai do not report themselves at the scene within 10-15 minutes of the call going out, the colour code on the command centre's screen changes and a follow up call will be made. The same applies when an officer has reported arrival at the scene and is then out of contact for longer than 10 minutes.

ALL monitored alarm calls also go to command and control, where they have a priority two rating. These are the bane of a DMA East garda's life. The division has a very high number of alarmed houses, but the rate of false alarms not exclusive to DMA East is about 89 per cent.

There is now a policy that four false alarms in a period of six months warrants a warning letter to the owner of the premises in question. Six false calls in the same period mean gardai will cease to answer them until the owner can show that the system has been repaired or replaced, or until it has been free of false alarms for six months.

The centralised system in Harcourt Square is still fairly new and is modelled on other successful systems overseas. But it has its frustrations for those based in the Garda stations a patrol car could be just around the corner from the station, but it must still be accessed via the centre.

Another irony of the system is that calls made direct to the local Garda station take longer to deal with than 999 calls. The station can direct foot patrols or motorcycle gardai, but in the case of patrol cars the call must be relayed via command and control. All calls to the control centre are taped and each day the master recording is filed away, to be produced, if necessary, in court cases and other inquiries.

There is still no substitute, however, for personal initiative. At about 1.45 p.m. yesterday, for instance, an off duty garda in DMA East became suspicious about the movements of a car in Blackrock. The vehicle was what gardai call a "company car" i.e. it was a wreck, bought for £25 or £30, perhaps, for use in small scale crime in the suburbs.

The garda's suspicions were heightened when the car's occupants bought £3 worth of petrol at a filling station in Blackrock. He eventually confronted them after observing one of the group stealing clothing from Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt. Another of the trio produced a syringe to warn him off, but the off duty man had called for back up from command and control and the three were duly arrested.

ELSEWHERE in Harcourt Square yesterday Dun Laoghaire's class of 96 was in for its weekly day in school. The 12 garda trainees, who entered training college in Templemore last October, are now on work experience in DMA East before a return to Templemore for further training and, they hope, graduation.

They wear uniforms and accompany DMA East's gardai on the beat. But a light blue attachment to their epaulettes signals that they have no powers.

In class yesterday they related their different experiences of the week with the drugs unit searching suspects in Dun Laoghaire working with Downs Syndrome children in a special school in Glenageary with the crime task force restraining an abusive woman in the ferry terminal.

In the last case, a trainee garda said she had formed the opinion that the woman was suffering from schizophrenia, but class tutor Garda Philip Ryan reminded her that, in such matters, the gardai have no opinion.

Asked what the worst part of the job in DMA East was in their still limited experience the class appeared unanimous. "The alarm calls", one student replied, to general agreement.