John Sweetman never really felt like a real garda, even after almost four years on the beat, until a violent case brought him into the Garda Technical Bureau. There, he found his true calling, spending the next quarter-century as an expert in fingerprints, forensic handwriting and documents.
By his own admission, Sweetman lacked self-confidence and found it impossible to “interact with people in the professional yet emotionally detached manner expected of a garda”, to the point where self-harming became a regular release for him. Indeed, he is honest about his struggles with depression throughout his life and career, including the path it played in his early retirement.
He provides an insight into life as a serving garda or “mule”, as members of the force refer to one another, from adolescent pranks to gallows humour. He’s astute at recognising every garda’s need to compartmentalise, to switch from normal mode to “prepared for fucking anything and plough on mode”. Occasionally Sweetman’s own prose can veer towards the macabre, such as his blithe assertion that “hungry pets cooped up with a juicy corpse is not a situation you want to walk in on.”
Sweetman reveals the meticulous techniques for examining prints and documents, recalls infamous crime scenes, from the 2006 killing of Gary Douch in Mountjoy to the murder of part-time DJ Bobby Ryan (aka Mr Moonlight) in 2011, and reveals the “dopamine buzz” when a fingerprint match would help to secure a conviction. This contrasts with his innate frustration at the “labour-intensive pencil-pushing” around policing and his cynicism concerning court proceedings: “the only winners were the legal eagles and the krill for their gullets – habitual criminals.”
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Never quite happy in a job “governed by rules, regulations and procedures”, Sweetman grew a beard and began to tattoo his body, “my way of rebelling against the rigid system that I had somehow chosen to be part of”. As his supervisors introduce yet more regulations, an increasingly bitter Sweetman argues that his job became more about “slavish adherence” to form-filling than actual police work, convinced that the forensic departments have become less efficient as a result, the backlog now stretching to years rather than months.
Sweetman acknowledges the good and bad sides of law enforcement, in what is an insightful and not entirely complimentary glimpse inside our national police force.
