If your postman were suddenly to announce that next week he would concentrate on providing daily deliveries of letters on one side of the road, this initiative to be designated Operation Sunny Side of the Street, he would be met with puzzled responses from the public. But when the Garda Siochana announces it will henceforth enforce the law in respect of seatbelts, roadworthiness of vehicles and speeding, we accept this in a straightforward, non-committal manner.
In advance of the recent August bank holiday, the Garda Traffic Policy Unit announced Operation Belt Up, to address seatbelt infringements; Operation Check Up, to focus on tyres, lights and brakes; and Operation Juggernaut and Operation Fare to concentrate respectively on heavy goods vehicles and buses, taxis and coaches. Would it not have been simpler to announce that members of the force would be on duty, and enforcing the law, over the weekend?
The reason the Garda makes such a song and dance about doing what everyone thought was being done all along is that we live in the era of public relations policing, the point of which is not just to do the job, but to be seen to be doing the job. The same principle applies to the recent publicity about the annual crime statistics, the point of which appears to have been to present the authorities in a pleasing light.
THE main focus was on the fact that crime figures were down by about 8 per cent in the first six months of 1999, compared to 1998, which in turn showed an improvement on 1997.
The Minister for Justice, Mr John O'Donoghue, claimed this as a vindication of his policies and of the performance of the Garda, which he said had been "spectacularly successful" in reducing crime. There followed the usual ideologically-inspired fracas, in which various interests sought to explain the crime figures in ways convenient to their own beliefs. Mostly these arguments centred on the nature of punishment rather than on the pattern of criminality.
Those who opposed Mr O'Donoghue's "zero tolerance" initiative naturally asserted that the improved statistics had nothing to do with such measures, and various alternative theories were advanced, including the success of community-based anti-drugs initiatives and the expansion of methadone treatment programmes. There appeared to be a consensus among such experts that increasing employment was causing criminals or would-be criminals to move into the legitimate economy.
Diverting as it may be to contemplate the prospect of former handbag snatchers operating as stock-jobbers in the Dublin Financial Services Centre, we need to present ourselves for a reality check if we are beginning to believe that increasing prosperity brings a decline in criminality.
And if you factor in the drug-related nature of much modern crime, you may decide that, contrary to the current mood of self-congratulation, our patterns of criminality give even more cause for concern than previously.
As I've observed before, fluctuations in the level of petty crime are intimately bound up with the availability and price of hard drugs on the street. Crime figures reached an all-time high here in the mid-1990s, coinciding with inflated street prices for heroin and other hard drugs.
Since then, prices have fallen significantly as the supply increased in spite of the best efforts of the authorities. Cheap, plentiful drugs mean less burglaries and handbag snatches, for the simple reason that a fix costs less. One of the strange ironies of a drug-saturated crime culture is that reduced levels of burglary and larceny, far from occasioning complacency, should be alerting the authorities to the fact they are losing the battle with the drug dealers.
THERE are other interesting aspects to the figures which have been reported but not explained. Firstly, while there has been a marginal fall-off in burglaries and larcenies, more serious categories of crime have shown significant increases. Armed robbery, for example, is up 110 per cent. Secondly, there is a somewhat erratic regional pattern to the alleged success by the Garda in fighting crime. Even John O'Donoghue was moved to wonder aloud why, with overall figures on the decline, was crime increasing in his Kerry backyard.
In general, crime appears to be decreasing in major urban centres, particularly Dublin, but escalating in areas not previously noted for significant criminal activity, such as Mayo, Roscommon, Kerry and Tipperary. We have therefore both a shift in the nature of criminal activity and a significant new trend in its location. A possible explanation is that, due to the success of dedicated Garda operations, crime is being shunted around, changing in form as it goes, so what we are experiencing is not the elimination of crime, but its displacement.
It follows also that, if criminals are being forced to travel longer distances to pursue their professional activities, they will seek to increase yields to cover increased overheads: the Dublin street pickpocket becomes an armed robber when forced by increased Garda vigilance to travel to Wexford or Portlaoise. Thus, crimes become less frequent, but more serious. This scenario, for which the latest figures provide some substantiation, is scarcely a cause for self-congratulation.
Rising crime is not an illusion. This is not to say that we require more jails, but simply to acknowledge what is true. Between the 1950s and 1980s levels of crime in most categories doubled every decade and would have doubled again in the 1990s except for the trends detailed above.
Another unquantifiable is the undoubtedly massive decline in the reporting of certain crimes. Scant information is available here about the detail of crime recording today as opposed to five, 10, 20 or 30 years ago, but British surveys reveal shifting patterns of public behaviour which, if they bear even a passing resemblance to the reality here, must cast serious doubts on all our crime statistics. For example, a 1988 British crime survey revealed that, between 1984 and 1988, the numbers of crimes which went unreported because of a belief that the police could do nothing about them rose from 16 per cent to 21 per cent.
This factor tended to affect principally categories of petty crime, such as burglary, larceny and vandalism, the survey finding that only one in four incidents of theft from a motor vehicle and one in 10 cases of vandalism was reported to the police.
This factor alone would go a long way in explaining the alleged decreases in overall crime figures in this country in recent years.