Some frontline gardaí working in roads policing were openly “hostile” towards doing their jobs and were “brazen” in expressing it to independent personnel sent to check on their performance.
A new report, commissioned by Garda Headquarters after an anonymous garda turned whistleblower, also found some senior Garda members were “afraid” to intervene when gardaí they were managing were persistently performing poorly.
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said he was “shocked” at what the report had found. Elaine Byrne, the head of the Policing and Community Safety Authority (PCSA), a Garda oversight agency, said the report was a “wake up” call for the Garda, adding the authority had “concerns about the absence of performance management within the guards”.
She described as “shocking” the way some gardaí openly expressed their lack of interest in doing their jobs when the personnel who were reviewing roads policing across the Garda went out on duty with them.
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“The blatant disregard that some members have ... and they knew they were being reviewed. They were in the cars with people [reviewing them] and they were openly hostile to doing their job,” she said.
Ms Byrne was also “shocked” that there “seemed to be a deference or a fear” among some Garda managers. They were “not actually doing performance management” because of “just a fear of being managers within the guards”. She added those managers were based in divisions across the country, where they were responsible for managing policing generally, not just roads policing.
Mr Harris said Crowe consultants had been commissioned to carry out the review of roads policing nationally after he had received anonymous correspondence from a Garda member working in roads policing. The review was complete, and the resulting report had been presented to the PCSA in June.
He planned to publish the report after it was checked to ensure nobody featured in it could be identified. However, it was clear to him a substantial number, though still a minority, of the gardaí engaged in roads policing were “brazen” about expressing their disinterest in their jobs and their hostility towards carrying out their basic duties.
[ Garda roads policing numbers hit historic low of 618Opens in new window ]
The duties of gardaí enforcing road traffic laws included performing speed checks, detecting people driving dangerously or using mobile phones. Roads policing Garda personnel are also responsible for conducting checkpoints to detect intoxicated drivers, among a wide range of other enforcement measures.
“It’s sobering, to say the least, in terms of its conclusions. It is shocking and very worrying,” Mr Harris said of the as yet unpublished Crowe report. “We were not pleased to see this report and to see the conclusions within it.”
As well as preparing to publish the report, Mr Harris said a working group had been established to act on the recommendations within the report. Both he and Ms Byrne made their comments to the media after a public meeting of the PCSA in Dublin on Thursday, where senior Garda officers were questioned about a range of policing issues by members of the authority.
In his final address to the authority, before his retirement on September 1st, Mr Harris said he was concerned about the proliferation of violent pornography as it was now being reflected in the nature of the violent sexual offences coming to the Garda’s attention.
Some people, mostly young men, had been “radicalised” by watching violent pornography to the extent that when they were arrested for committing sexual offences “it literally has to be explained to them what they did was wrong”. He believed sexual crimes and violence in the home needed to become public health concerns, rather than just policing issues.
