Dáil debates

Wednesday, 18 November 2020

Community Safety and Preventing Crime: Statements

 

6:35 pm

Photo of Martin KennyMartin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I understand that and I am sorry. I will move on now to speak about the issues of community policing and community safety. I spoke to someone today who works with many of the community drugs initiatives in the city of Dublin who said that at the core of all of this is having a police service that is rooted in the community. In order for that to happen, we need to see a greater effort to ensure that community police are visible on the streets and that they build up a relationship with local communities. I acknowledge the work to which the Minster refers here and the local community safety partnerships are exactly the direction in which we need to go. There is much to be commended about this initiative but there is also so much to be done. We are coming from a place whereby so many communities are very far behind.

As others have said, there are clear and difficult issues in communities that do not trust the police force because they have not had good experience with policing. Communities which had community liaison officers in place and had work going on with community projects have seen those projects stripped of their funding. They have lost so much ground in recent years and that needs to be restored as quickly as possible. In many of these areas drug seizures are a feature. Indeed, there have been many very large seizures this year and that is to be welcomed. However, when seizures happen and arrests follow, we all consider that to be a great success but many of the communities involved see no change in the weeks that follow. They see no difference. Someone else comes in and just fills that void. This tells us that there is much work to be done in order to ensure that there is an holistic community response. That is why we need to get to the stage where it is not just about dealing with the issue of crime but all of the other problematic issues at play in communities that are under stress and pressure. In order to do that, we must work not just from a policing perspective but also from a societal perspective in terms of ensuring that there are adequate resources available in these communities. In so many of them, that is absent. They have faced huge problems in trying to run community services over the years with restricted budgets and are so far behind as a result.

The work the Minister is doing here and the suggestion she is making that the Garda co-operate and work with other agencies is exactly what needs to happen.

However, many of those agencies do not have the resources or capacity to ensure that they can deliver. One of the suggestions put to me today by the person I mentioned, who works at the coalface, was for the appointment of a type of liaison officer who is not a garda and who would work in the community and be trusted by it. He or she would be almost a type of social worker who would be able to gather information, understand what is happening and ascertain the pressures on people. The Minister acknowledged that, very often, the work gardaí do is not tackling crime as such, but is more about managing difficult situations and problems such as antisocial behaviour in a particular area. Much of that problem behaviour stems from addiction but also from poverty, mental health problems and other issues which arise out of the absence of resources in communities.

We must have a joined-up approach to tackling these issues. I absolutely appreciate that the Minister's proposals are going in that direction but there is much more to be done. Sometimes, there is an absence of understanding of just how far behind some communities are. Those communities, if they got a little bit of help and if some level of resources were put into them, would step up to the mark and really move forward. As I said, the proposals the Minister outlined are a step in the right direction but there is a huge distance to go. The sooner more resources can be put in place, the better. They must deliver for communities in a clear way that involves real change, not just a headline in the newspaper or on the news that something has happened and is a success, when, in their own lives, people see that nothing has changed and the same problems are still there. We need to be able to deliver for people in a real way.

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