Inertia-Led Policing

Anthony McIntyre ☠ The events in Dublin last Thursday suggest intelligence-led policing is an oxymoron.

The type of intelligence acquired led Garda right off the beaten track while a right wing hate mob was on it with free reign, wreaking havoc. Intelligence-led policing took the Garda leadership into a cul-de-sac where it sat blinkered, unable to anticipate Thursday's events. If your job is to anticipate, and you can't anticipate then you are not fit for purpose. The image of a police public order unit wielding a baton has given way to one of it wielding a white stick.

Some Garda played a price for a failure of policing. There is footage of one being attacked, punched and kicked. He gave no ground but had he fallen to the ground the possibility of serious injury or death was real. Individuals like him on the street behaved “in an extraordinary fashion”. Those safely ensconced in Phoenix Park too behaved in extraordinary fashion, abysmally abdicating their responsibility and then making extraordinary excuses to explain their inertia-led policing.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris might be right in that he did not foresee what was going to occur. He fails to see that just about everybody else did. And if Harris is right then he is in the wrong job. One Garda representative said: ‘the dogs on the street knew what was going to happen, bar our leadership seemingly.’ Social media messages were flying around the web from Thursday afternoon urging people to assemble in the city centre, kill immigrants and march on the home of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar:

One voice note that was widely shared on messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp encouraged people to kill any foreigners they met.

Given his instincts from when he served as a senior cop in the North, running point within the PSNI for MI5, Drew Harris will have enough plants within the far right who could have helped him foresee. People who feel at liberty to post such incitement online in advance of events are probably agents of Garda Special Branch. They don't fear arrest because they have nothing to fear from arrest. They are a protected species across the board, Right or Left. But even allowing for the possibility that they are not Garda plants the information that they put into the public domain was available to Garda intelligence. It simply was not acted upon.

The claim by Drew Harris that ‘there is no failure here . . . Nobody could have anticipated these events”’ is an echo not dissimilar from his RUC days when it was claimed that there is no collusion here . . . nobody could anticipate the murder of nationalists.

In this morning's Sunday Independent there was a bold statement that for both Drew Harris and Justice Minister Helen McEntee there simply was No hiding place left. The paper opined:

an almost nationwide alert for additional garda personnel to come to secure the city’s streets was not sent out until shortly before 7.30pm on the night, even though mayhem had been ensuing for several hours at that stage. What sort of management was this?

The sort of management that forgets that the art of diplomacy is to walk softly but carry a big stick. The Irish Times identified the problem in May:

several gardaí who believed the policing of anti immigration protests – specifically the more aggressive, far-right events – was too soft. They said a cohort of far right protesters had for months conducted themselves at events in a manner that breached the criminal law, committing public order crimes or abuse-based and threat-based offences, but had not been arrested.

This is long how the PSNI has dealt with its loyalist gang problem. Under Harris the Garda has dealt with its own loyalist gang problem no differently.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.