GOVERNMENT Departments and agencies, other than the Garda, should be doing more and giving a better lead" in the fight against crime, the outgoing Garda 55, Mr Patrick Culligan, has said.
In one of his final public appearances before he retires next Mr Culligan reiterated his calls for a higher standard of debate about the role of police in society and society's own attitudes and response to crime.
He implicitly criticised the role of other Government agencies and was openly critical of the use of exaggeration and "hyperbole" in crime reporting in newspapers. He also spoke of the "golden era myth" of a perfectly secure society and pointed out that the State had much lower crime levels than many other developed societies.
In hips address to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce yesterday, the Commissioner said. "Increased public awareness and discussion are necessary to develop the intellectual resources of the Garda Siochana and allied agencies if they are to avoid a descending spiral of crisis management in the short to medium term
"the challenge for effective policing are those really facing all sectors of Irish society. Many of the results of the profound changes which have taken place in Ireland since the founding of the State, specifically in terms of Garda functions, derive from two sources firstly the changes in demographic, economic and social regions and secondly the increasing difficulty in preventing and detecting crime due to a diminution of public awareness which, in turn, affects the administration of justice.
Challenges to authority of all kinds permeated society, and police problems were exacerbated further by a lack of understanding of the relationship between authority and the citizen in a multicultural, multi national world he said.
"In this scenario, the issue of community responsibility assumes a significance which has yet to be fully assessed or articulated. The very nature of community, once so easily assumed as a familiar term, has to be redefined in terms of both Ireland's own changing experience and the evolving European Union and its relationship with the rest of the world.
"As Irish society continues to be transformed by developments at home and abroad, attitudes to crime and to justice will adapt new aspects and these will affect both the precepts and practices of police work."
The nature of crime was changing, he said, and criminals and potential criminals were becoming more sophisticated both in the skills they brought to crime and in the objects of their lawlessness.
Technology had helped them as much as it had the guardians of the peace. As a result, crime especially fraud and drug trafficking had become more professional and more international and police work had consequently become more complex and diplomatic.
At the other end of the scale society was now more conscious of domestic violence. "As a force, An Garda Siochana cannot police she family home, but togethers allied agencies it can with it must, learn more about the changing nature of family life and the possibly violent tensions placed by factors such as the economy, the educational System and peer pressure on the shoulders of marriage, parenthood and juvenility.
"In my view, the future scenario of criminal activity will see a diminution of the scourge of terrorism, subversive activity and related social disorders with more resources thus becoming available to be deployed in the prevention and detection of rising challenges."
He spoke of the improvements in information handling allowing "back room" paperwork to be handled more efficiently, freeing more gardai for beat work.
"The major benefit to the force is by its core values being constant. Its ethos can be developed not merely to keep pace with the changes to which I have referred but to anticipate them. Thus traditional change can become a cardinal aspect of the way we discharge our responsibilities.
"Reaffirming the neighbourhood as the key area where gardai, the local population and other public agencies meet and form an effective mesh of wisdom, discretion and skills will be one of the essential parts of work in the next decade.
"The value system of our organisation is in transition from a traditional model of control to one of commitment to the core values of the force. The values remain constant, but our observance of responsibilities and performance of our duties give rise to a fresher, more responsive and reinvigorated ethos.
"Our core values are and will be service and courtesy to the public a team work approach which values participative management professionalism and cost consciousness pride in being a member of the organisation and strict compliance with the spirit and provision of our laws."
He said management of the Garda "will be characterised by total quality management which is based on the premise that those we serve will receive the best possible service at the most efficient and cost effective level."
"Employee participation, innovation, access to information and accountability will improve the sense of the organisation as an organic entity and the possession and articulation of its ethos. The key words of the ethos are integrity, excellence, vision, empowerment, effort and, dare I say it openness.
"In 1994, the last year for which official crime figures have been published, crime in Ireland rose to over 100,000. The last time that recorded crime rose to 100,000 in this country was in the early 1980s. So, from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s crime has remained relatively still."
He said Ireland had the lowest homicide rate in Europe and a level of burglary about the middle of the European crime table. He compared the Republic's crime figures with those of the West Midlands police area in Britain which has a population of 2.6 million covering Birmingham and Coventry, with a sizeable rural area. In that area, in 1994, there 308,584 crimes were recorded, "three times more than the total crime in the 26 counties of Ireland".
He asked why newspapers overestimated crime levels and "why we feel there is more crime around".
"Why indeed. Firstly, there is the exaggerated language and hyperbole of certain newspapers. Secondly, there has been an increase in loutish, ignorant behaviour by young people in public places which creates apprehension in citizens and can be very intimidating, and, thirdly, the nature of criminal activity is changing in that more frequently nowadays crime which heretofore amounted to petty stealing is accompanied by gratuitous use of violence. It is a cause of great concern to us that this type of crime is increasing while other crimes on the decrease.
"Since the 1960s there has been a breakdown of consensus, not about the role of the gardai but about the nature of crime itself. We in the Garda Siochana can only remain the guardians of anally accepted ideas of night and wrong with undisputed authority to enforce agreed standards of behaviour where there is a clear consciousness of right and wrong and a willing acceptance by the community of the constraints which that consciousness places on each of its members.
"We must find again the concept of wrongdoing as something for which we have personal responsibility in all areas of community life. Standards can only be set by the community itself and only the community can determine how high its standards will be. People not only feel less safe than they think they once were, recalling some mythical golden age of perfect security, but also feel much less sure of the role of the Garda."
Society had failed to think about the real causes of crime.
"It may well be that society will only change direction and start thinking about the real causes of crime when crime and anarchy have reached an unbearable pain threshold. We have not reached that point and, indeed, in truth we are having clustering [of crime].
"But the point needs to be made, nonetheless, that the root causes argument in which crime is said to be just a symptom of deprivation, poverty or alienation began as an appendage left wing ideology but soon took on a life of its own, extending its influence until it became the received wisdom of the serious media.
"In sum, we have the gardai fired on from both sides those who seek vengeance against the disrupters of domestic peace and those who feel that the criminal is society's true victim. We have dismantled our concept of wrongdoing and replaced it with a circular account of crime as an inevitable effect of some socially determined causal change."
This reasoning had undermined the cultural consensus in which gardai used to operate and citizens would not be satisfied with An Garda Siochana until there was some agreement about what they were for.
He said abuse of drugs would never be prevented by police but "no other organisation in this State has done more to counter the drug menace than the Garda Siochana . . . Yet despite this no other organisation comes in for more criticism than we do. One has to ask is it because of a guilt complex by people and agencies who themselves should be doing more and giving a better lead?"
