9. Policed in Ireland – Stop and Search

[Music] Welcome to Police in Ireland. The podcast that seeks to capture the experiences people have with the police. I'm Dr. Vicky Conway and I'm passionate about listening to people from all different walks of life, about how they experience our police on Guardia Shirkana. [Music] And the guards just kind of pulled in just immediately like go to the car and grabbed the boy who was like 16 at the time. And just was shouting abuse and dishear and calm and magpiesy and a scumbag and I don't know what he's done wrong to deserve that. For like all male guards like you know. This week we're hearing from a teenage sister and brother who live in Dunnegall just outside a sizable town. We won't be using their real names but Orla is 17 and her brother Brendan is 14. They're going to tell us their experiences of being policed on a day-to-day basis and the levels of stop and search they endure. We're going to talk a lot about what stop and search is and what impact it has, aided by Dr. John Topping. We're also going to think about what we want the police to be doing and we'll talk to Professor Alex Vitale about the role of the police and the defund the police movement. [Music] Well usually they just perform and can I stop and search kind of thing just for whatever reason you know if you're kind of looking dodgy or if you look rough thought day maybe or if you're wearing tracks at bottoms or something. Most of the time yeah they can I get to a stage where they're kind of getting a bit intimidating or something if they're like if they have something. I tend to just keep it chill like and just stay relaxed and just like just kind of like go with it and just like let them do their re-thing because you does like none until we were in about like so just let them do their searches or let them do their whatever you know. [Music] Stop and search is a very particular police power it allows the police to stop an individual on the street and search their persons and their belongings is often described by the police as a valuable policing tool to enable them to find drugs or weapons on the street thus preventing crime. We'll get into the rarcity of those statements in a bit. It might not seem like a particularly invasive power but that's an easy position to adopt when you are not subject to it regularly and if it doesn't feel like you're being targeted or continually targeted for no good reason. This has been an exceptionally controversial power in both the UK and the US where racial and class bias are very evident in the data. Black people are seven or eight times more likely to be stopped and searched in the UK. There are far less public conversations about this power than elsewhere possibly for a number of reasons. First of all we very little data on how often stops are conducted and we certainly don't have breakdowns of ethnicity age gender and so on. Figures which are totally commonplace in England and Wales. It's very hard to talk about it when we know so little. Second the powers are different here they're much more diffuse rather than having one standard power which can be used we have a wide range of powers to stop, stop and question, stop and search. Third there haven't been many spaces for those who have experienced it to discuss it. An artist in residence in the reality youth project asked 60 young people to discuss a moment when they felt powerless and have asked number of the responses concerning the Guardian and stop and search. An exhibition was held and training for Guardian was developed but unfortunately the crash would have hauled to that. Whenever we do get to hear about it what we hear is consistent that those that are subject to repeated stops begin to feel highly resentful they feel disrespected they feel policed they feel targeted they distrust the police they begin to distrust the state. This is serious and so we need to listen to these experiences and listen to what it means for these young people. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a stop and search inherently involves an invasion of your right to privacy and so if the state is going to do it they have to put the proper laws and safeguards in place to ensure that your rights aren't actually being breached. I'm 40 and I'm never been stopped and searched by the Guardian on the street. A couple of road checks sure but never just walking down the street. That's not the experience of warla the 17. Not sure maybe five or six. That's not that much so. She described in detail her most recent experience with the Guardian which just happened a week before we recorded. A week ago or so I was like walking with my boyfriend but he was just coming out going out for like a rolly because he like smokes. I'm going to go right back home and these two guards pull up. They're two like woman guards and then I was kind of thinking like all their woman guards they might not be like pure dickheads or something they might just be sweet like. What do you do out at this time? I was walking out for like and he's having a smoke like and then they're like well we're going to conduct search anyways because we think you look dodgy and we're like right okay gone ahead. And then they searched us and then they found you know and but they still kind of they were still kind of like nagging. There's still just been like oh well what were you doing out at this time now? We were like we're just like we're just like first smoke like we literally had the smoke still in his hands. Like when they're searching our pockets they find like money and my boyfriend's pockets and it was like I don't know it was a dough money and I think there was only like 70 or something like. And they're just like oh what's that for and he was like oh that's my dough and they're like oh what are you planning on spending that on? And he was just like well I need to give her a hug to my mom later and I don't know yet why like they're like also why do you have it out with you now? Like why do you have it out with you now? And he was like well I didn't like you know I'm just really just out for smoke like you know they took the phone and then they wouldn't give the phone back because it was his mom's phone. And then they're trying to say that like maybe like is the phone stolen or something like because it wasn't his. You know so they're like oh well is it your mom's phone so if I take it back to her house now you know she's gonna be able to unlock it. And he was like yeah and they're like oh really we're we're gonna go over here now with the phone then he was like right and then they get in the car with the phone and they're just like looking like the window and then he was trying to talk to his box he was like oh did you give that money back? Because they had taken it off him and they were both handling it like and the woman guards she pure leans out the window and starts saying what are you trying to say? She was like she literally said what are you trying to say? Are you trying to say I stole your money are you are you talking as if she's some kind of street thug or something like the guy I'm starting going what are you trying to say? What are you trying to say? I was like I was so shocked I was like what the hell like why is she speaking like that? She was like you're away with the fairies you're I never took your money are you trying to say I stole your money and all and he was like he was like no no he was like I never said that he was just like I was just asking if you have remembered to give it back because you couldn't find it. She was like tell me again are you trying to say did I stole your money are you are you and she kept saying are you are you and he was like freaking out check in his pockets like oh my god like okay sorry he was like sorry you know and then he found it then and he was like I'm sorry and things like I just didn't know I thought you know I brought up on her or whatever she was just like she was like I watch yourself and then she drove on and she went back over to the price and the car was just standing outside with his mum you know with the phone like you know they're like oh they actually went and brought the phone. Yeah they're like we're on lock in this phone now you know we're on lock in this phone now and they unlocked the phone she was like go ahead like and then they're just like you whatever you just like read some messages and they're just like right that's okay give the phone back they're like oh yeah watch yourself walk around in dark places in the night or I don't know what she said but it was something pure like walk around at this time of the night. COVID appears to have only made this worth. I just seen them kind of stopping people like laugh right in the center you know I just remember going to the shop and just I'd see someone get searched or something or I was like I remember I got soft a few times like within two the two kilometers of like where I live like and like or like even closer than two kilometers like less than a kilometer they just stop you like if they see me walking about just because then you they could go to the because of the virus and all. What are you doing out in Bava? I was just a third like nice one. Here's an excuse to stop anyone now. Didn't seem like they cared about the virus at home. It was just kind of like their chance to like get people or something for no reason, for just leaving their houses or going to the shop. She's witnessed quite violent encounters, which bring up similar themes as we've seen before, particularly around mobile phones. Like Halloween or something, and like we were all kind of walking along this like a stick. And like there was just a big cry to people, 10 or 12 or something, just a load of, just a big group like. We were just walking along the road and like these guards stopped us because they're like, "Oh, what are you doing?" And they're just drinking and whatever, you know, you know, guards doing their like patrol and Halloween. Like one of the guards, like, the guards came out and they just kind of start chatting to the group of people and I just kind of like walked on. I was like, "Oh, I just know that I'm gonna get searched and I'm gonna get stopped and they're gonna chat." I mean, it's just an eye in, so I just was like whatever. I just walked out to the crowd. This is the fight I was never in. The crowd like, you know, I started walking away and then they were chatting away. Did I and people like the group of people and they're kind of getting like all cheeky with them and kind of all the guards were like, and then they started getting all rough with this one boy and then he wouldn't be a traveler but he would be kind of like, not, he wouldn't have much money like his family might have like a bad word for themselves in the time or whatever, but he's like really nice. But anyways, they started getting all cheeky with him and trying to like, trying to annoy him and kind of trying to widen them up and stuff and then they started getting all rough and started grabbing him and then he took out his phone and started videoing them and they were like, they had him grabbed and they were like, had him by the neck and all and they appear being rough with him and grabbing him and they just like put him up against the fence by his neck and all. And then he was like, videoing them and they were like, they were getting even more rough and I'm trying to take the phone off them and then eventually they just kind of got a hold of him and then they took the phone off him and then when they had the phone, they were like, shitting at him, telling him that he had to unlock the phone and he didn't want to unlock the phone and they kept putting him around and stuff and they were like, unlock it, just unlock the phone and they unlock the phone and they did the video and then just like kind of sent him on just like whatever, you know, and they just left. - That's been pretty shook up by that. - Yeah, he was pretty upset about it. Her brother Brandon, who is just 14, has also had such experiences. - So I was up at the like square area around like nine o'clock. I sit in there with three other boys. I just sat down and I was talking and then my was waiting on somebody else. Then guards came around the corner and then they just, you know, seen us up there, you know, like lovely, turned up, you know, olden, started talking to us, asked us, you know, what we're doing and stuff. You know, we were just like sitting and talking, you know, and then they were about to send us on our way and then one of the boys, he left, like a weed grandeur there so that they were all like, then they stopped us from walking away and then they started like getting our, you know, information and stuff. - At this point, the guardie wanted to determine who owned the weed grinder. It's not legal to own a grinder, but guardie may interpret it as a reasonable suspicion of an awful drug possession. - No, after a while since nobody would really say anything like nobody was gonna say who owned it 'cause nobody, nobody does that kind of thing like, so then they took us all up and they were kind of being very like aggressive and pushy with the boy that was the same age as me. He's, he's a bit smaller than me, but like he hits a lot of abuse from guards. One of them was getting on to him because one of his cousins in like Belfast had like a charge for assaulting someone and they were like giving him abuse over that even though it's the other side of the country. They were pushing him around a bit and he was just kind of like trying to get under the car. You know, we didn't want them to do anything like someone ever we were driving up, I remember, I was getting called like over and over from my stout mum. I sit in the side of guard at that point and then there was the youngest boy sitting on the other side of the guard. This is in the back of a party wagon. So then, and I said, can I answer this? And then he was like, no, no, we're gonna call your parents whenever we get into the station anyway. So then we got there and then they put everybody in different rooms because apparently we were taken up on the suspicion of having stuff on us. So then they took us up to search us. That was why they took us up. And then they never even searched me. They just made me empty out my pockets. One of them brought me into the room with us. Lady and she was actually quite nice. You know, she was just asking me questions like, you know, getting a rerun of all the information off me and then they sent me back to the room and then guard came in and he sat in front of me and then he was talking to me for a while and just asking me about she questions like, firing as many at me, you know? And then another guard came and she was real dick, you know? She was like being way more like pushy with me and she'd already like spoken to all of the other ones. I think I was the last person that they spoke to. Oral and Brandon have an older brother who's been in trouble with the police quite a bit. They feel this gets used against them. Since the new mebrialler was, they were kind of like jumping to a lot of conclusions, really, about where stuff could have come from. After being there for about 45 minutes or so, then I heard one of them, the boy that was the same age as me, he was leaving. I seen him through the door with his dad, I think. So I was like, "Oh, finally." So like, I said, "I'm just gonna be here now or dad's gonna be here or something, you know?" By now, Brandon has been questioned by three different guardians without a parent or a guardian present as should happen and without being offered a solicitor. No criminal proceedings followed, though he was grounded and a friend believes there's still something on pulse about him. I actually was talking to another boy's, I was talking to him about it a few weeks ago. He actually said that they still have it marked down because one of the boys had two bags of kitchen herbs and they still have it marked down as kind of us, two bags of kind of us. And even when they do act respectfully, it's not on problematic. On a different occasion, Brandon encountered police after illegal fireworks had been set off. The first patrol that came up, they were quite nice. You know, they were just very respectful and pretty sure they were new, though. So they probably didn't really know how guards are around here, you know? They were the only instance where I've seen guards being polite to you, but they want to know if you've done something wrong at the same time. They never asked to look through my bag or anything. They just said, "Do you know who was that love "the fireworks?" And I was like, "I wasn't really around." I was, but I was just laying at them. I don't want to talk to them. And then whenever the second patrol came up, it was just two absolute decks like, you know, they had nothing to hide. They were like presenting their hatred to us. Or hatred towards us to us. - You felt hated. - Kind of. Like, felt like they just look down upon us as like all of us are scumbags or something. - The misuse of drugs act is a very commonly used provision which permits a search where a guard with reasonable cause suspects that someone is in possession of a controlled drug. The Firearms Act of 1925 permits stop and search of any person whom a guard is suspects with reasonable cause to be in possession of a firearm or ammunition, knife or realistic imitation firearm. So for both of these powers, the guard must have suspicion and that suspicion must be reasonable. Other provisions under the offenses against the state act don't require reasonableness. - I think traditionally in the North we've been very concerned with counter-terrorist type powers. - Dr. John Topping of Queen's University, Belfast has been researching stop and search in Northern Ireland. - Nobody had ever really looked at all at ordinary stop and search powers, as you might see on the street. So this is something I had managed to dig into. And very quickly, it became apparent that the PS and I were very much out of step with that, which was going on in England of Wales in terms of the sheer volume of use around or not. ordinary stop and search powers and also in terms of the outcomes or, I suppose more accurately, the lack of outcomes at 95% of all stop and searches in Northern Ireland do not result in an arrest. So just 5% result in an arrest, fewer again in charges and convictions and this invariably targets young people more. The other sort of side to the coin has been the impact in effect on children and young people in particular, you know, what we know with the PS and I, about 60% of all stop and searches are done on people of 25 years old and under and it is, as we know from all, the social scientific evidence, you know, it has a net negative effect on police, community relations, it's a confrontational part, it can be antagonistic and the other thing is it's also very difficult to accurately monitor and while PS and I might record stop and searches a bit like ordinary crime that there's always a dark figure, there's always the unseen level happening, so I think that's very much a case with stop and search as well. Because of course young people by lifestyle are generally more visible on the streets, you know, they tend to be saying that age old issue which goes back to Shakespeare and beyond of young people's behaviours and you know, we say that very much in terms of, especially you might call it the science of hanging out, if you want young people we know from any of the evidence, you know, value actually straight public, straight space leisure time, you know, for friendship, for solidarity, for entertainment and that is, you know, not at all criminal, but you know, when people and the police see groups of young people, of course, it's very easy to draw the wrong conclusion. So, you know, young people have always been a focus of the criminal justice system and of course, if you're a young person, you know, in terms of your rights, in terms of how you perceive the police, that very differential par dynamic that there is between a police officer and a 15 or a 16 or a 17 year old who doesn't actually know what rights are entitled to when they engage with a police officer on stop and search. So, you know, those are very real issues. We have that the young life and time survey in Northern Ireland and that's a representative survey of all 16 year olds across the North and we find, you know, very significant problems with stop and search in terms of, first of all, not understanding their own rights, in terms of lack of recording in terms of stop and search being seen variously as a form of harassment, as a form of abuse as a par dynamics. So, all those things are very real and I think, you know, it's very easy to get lost in this statistics and, you know, percentages. Well, actually, these are very real lived experiences for young people and they have long term effects in terms of all police community relations. Orla has seen this and how members of the Traveler community can get a particularly tough. One time when I had bumped into some person, it was running around the street and I mad are, but I had like no one from the time. I don't, I would really like speak to this person like I wouldn't really like spend time with them right, but like I just knew them. But like they were, you know, popping about, you know, the street and then these guards pull up. He was just walking kind of along, just kind of minding his own business and the guards just kind of pulled up like just from around the corner, just unexpected, just kind of pulled in and just, they just immediately like got out of the car and grabbed the boy who was like 16 at the time and they just like pushed him into the guard, a car and pushed his head into the thing, but I just heard him to the glass of the car like it just was shouting of you some days a year and calling him a gypsy and a scumbag and I don't know what he done wrong to deserve that. But he was, I'm great, you know, there's two male, four-legal male guards like, you know, so surely that's not before so that's not great and someone very young. They tend to target travelers or people like less money or, you know, not the same classes and whatever. One of the things that made me sad talking to Orla was how she'd learn to adjust her behavior so as not to aggravate the guardie. Just because like they just do the same thing every time anyways, so he may just like learn to live with it like do your own we think back like, you know, whatever, just laugh them do what they want because they're just wasting like their own time, you know. And what do you think would be the response if he says no, I don't want you to search my back or they'd probably just like, they probably just wouldn't give a shit like, I don't do it anyway. Yeah. Orla has rights in this situation. If the guardie want to stop you, they need to have a power to do so. It's perfectly lawful to say, okay, guardie, under what power are you stopping me? They should reply and form you if the law they are invoking. But Orla is a bit beaten down, things that will make things worse, so no longer tries and just goes along with it. And even then, even when they do their best not to aggravate the situation, it can still feel invasive and disrespectful. We were just walking down the street, they got nupin and the guards stopped him and they were asking him questions and asking to search him and he was like, he was agreeing and saying, right, okay, you know, go ahead and they were rushing for him to take his job burn and he was caught off and nagging at him and they were telling him to hurry up and push him and put pressure on and they kind of shouted at him and tell him to hurry up and everything and he was taking off and jumping and ripped over his head all the way down to his chest. And they just didn't really care much. It was really an idea because it was just like something nice he had like that got destroyed. Orla is really clear that people are being stereotyped by the police. Well, you just never see guards can I stop and people wearing a suit or whatever, you know you would see the guards bothering them but if like their parents kind of come home to cross us maybe rough or maybe as if they don't have that much money they tend to target them type of people. A further grind which she perceives as causing discrimination includes having a family member who may have been in trouble with the guardie. They see it as like if he's bad then I become bad too or something, you know, and you have their like asking me all these questions or like trying to like can I antagonize or something. All of this leads to very negative feelings about guards. They're kind of just so so much more don't think that they are focusing on the right things maybe. Would you trust them like would you go to them if you had a problem? I probably not know. No. They don't treat you like equals they treat you like they know that you've done something wrong the second they look into your eyes like they're also they're always very pushy as well they're never like they're never you know just polite. They never feel like they're working for us they feel like they're working to get us like you know. I really fucking hate the guards like everybody that I know like except for like people that would be like they have relatives that are guards or something. John Topping is very clear on what this means. What we know from PS and I data is in fact that the the majority of ordinary stops and searches are done under drugs legislation. So what we're actually saying is the use of drugs legislation to target young people for low level drug possession and while that may be some viable policy in the justice world actually that the reality is you know drugs are not paying fine on young people through the medium of stop and search. So you might as well as more accurately describe stop and search as a gateway par through which to control and coerce young people and you know that the evidence has been there for the police service of Northern Ireland for you know over a decade of various pieces of research show that this is what young people think. So it's a spot you might describe it as a slippery par as well because of course what we again know is that most stop and searches are done in urban locations they tend to be more concentrated in places that suffer from socioeconomic marginalization. So and also less so in for example city centers it tends to be concentrated in for example you know housing a state or other areas away from what would generally be publicly visible. So yeah it is a it's a hidden par but nonetheless it doesn't make it you know any any better of an experience for the young people. John's assessment is that energy will be better spent elsewhere by the police. I think when you look at all the statistics and all the metrics of success, it is not a good use of police time, it's not a good use of police authority. Certainly they have an evidence around stop and search as a crime fighting tactic. Absolutely does not stack up. And as I said before, we know it overall has a net negative effect and when it is used repetitively in certain locations because we have to remember it's not a random part, it is concentrated and usually requires reasonable suspicion. It does tend to be concentrated on particular sections of society in particular areas and you know you don't need to look too far back in history to the Brixton riots of 1981 to the London riots of 2011. You know in those instances stop and search was cited as a very significant factor in terms of aggravation and discord towards the police and the breakdown of police community relations. It might sound like a huge leap to go from a stop and search on the streets to the Brixton riots but this is what the evidence tells us time and again. Stopps have an entirely minimal impact on crime rates but a massive impact on how the communities that are subjected to them feel about the police. I asked Orla what she thought needed to change. I don't know maybe like changing the system or something or changing what guards are allowed to do you know and what they can and can't do like or maybe just setting more rules in place or something because there's more rules on the people than there is kind of the guards. A lot of them they just seem to go on as if like the rules don't apply to them as well or something you know. I think they shouldn't be allowed to stop and search unless they have like a proper reason like they shouldn't be allowed to like put their hands on anyone and that's like maybe that person is getting violent with them or something but like they should I feel like they shouldn't be allowed to like touch anyone unless like they really need to. What Orla describes here is already the case they need the power to stop you and they should only use force when necessary. They get rid of all the guards maybe like put in some kind of new security. I tried to explore further what she meant here and asked if she thought we could reform the police to the point that people could trust them. Maybe start again you know everyone can I hate the guards like so they may as well just get rid of them and do something else because I mean there's no point fixing the guards now because they've already they've already dug their wall too deep now people already can I hate them for all things they keep doing like even like other countries like. Stop and search has been at the heart of the worst moments in British and American policing and we're hearing from Orla and Brendan about how it's left them feeling about the police. We don't know how often it's being used in Ireland but anyone who speaks to young people in socio economically disadvantaged areas will hear a worrying trend. It is led Orla to say that we should be getting rid of police. This isn't a naive or childish view for anyone who's dismissing it it's actually at the heart of the movement in the states to defund the police. It's so crystal clear in the United States now how we have turned every societal problem into a problem of crime to be solved by policing. Professor Alex Fatale is coordinator of the policing and social justice project at Brooklyn College an author of The End of Policing. Mass homelessness mass un-intreated mental health and substance abuse problems widespread economic precarity that has driven people into black markets of drugs and sex work and stolen property. We've got school failures and breakdown of family stability and all those problems have been reframed as problems of crime that will only respond to intensive and aggressive policing. And then when that policing is violent racially discriminatory, excessive, we're told that the solution to that is to give the police more money for more training, more professionalization, more body cameras and oversight mechanisms, all of which deflects us from these larger questions of why have we produced mass homelessness and just allowed it to occur without any real political conversation. Neither of our political parties in the states is saying one word about the fact that there are millions of people without a stable place to live in the United States. That the way we fund education is so fundamentally unequal that it produces this tremendous burn on teachers, on students that then get expressed as disciplinary problems which then get addressed by filling the schools with police. Applying this to this context, we might say that the issues of how teenagers engage with society are being converted into policing matters. Young people are simply hanging out, but perhaps in underprivileged areas, they can't do that under friendsiles so they do it on the street. And this gets converted from standard behavior to anti-social behavior on the police are called. And over time, police start to assume that kids on the street are up to no good. So the end of policing is not an effort to think about how can we do policing better? It's a cry, it's a demand that we think about how we can address societal problems without relying on essentially violence workers because that's really what distinguishes police from other governmental workers is that authorization and capacity to use force, whether backed up by the law or not. And so policing should always be understood as an inherently problematic tool that should always be the tool of last resort. We've heard this a few times from young people on this podcast. Orlan Brandon have both discussed the levels of violence by police that they have witnessed. And we remember when Oscar told us in an earlier episode, I was a quite extreme force used on him before he got to the police station. But unfortunately in the US and increasingly throughout Europe, policing is becoming the tool of first resort for just a growing number of social problems. You know, the Irish public has been told that the only tool that's available to produce public order is police. But that public order was originally a public order that served English colonial interests. And then with independence, those structures really remained unchanged and unchallenged and just got transported to the benefit of the new political leadership of Ireland that has been allowed to sort of continue this underfunding of the social safety net. If you're in a mental health crisis in Ireland, it is invariably the police that will respond rather than medics because of the capacity to use force and because of availability. So police are authorized and outfitted to use force in a way that other public employees are not. You know, a sanitation worker, if your car is like blocking the street, is not allowed to drag you out of the car and arrest you. They have to call a police officer. If they need that done, a public health worker does not tackle people on the street for not wearing a face mask. If that work is needed, they call a police officer. So when we say something is a police problem, there's the standard narrative is, oh, well, that means a law needs to be enforced. But that's not actually the case. There are lots of administrative ways of enforcing the law. A police officer is called when we need that implicit threat of violence. Even if an officer is not carrying a gun, they are capable and authorized of enacting violence. Even if it is just, you know, barking a command at someone that's backed up by the threat of, or we will tackle you, we will take our baton out, we will pepper spray you, we will use a taser or whatever. Alex is very firm in his view. That before and does not work. No, we've seen this so clearly in the US, right? After the uprising in Ferguson, the police killing of Eric Garner, we were told that policing was going to get reformed. The Obama administration issued this task force report with all these amazing recommendations. Now, many things were not enacted, but some cities like Minneapolis embraced a huge array of these reforms. The officers that were involved in the death of George Floyd had had implicit bias training, had had mindfulness training, had had de-escalated training. We're wearing body cameras. We're operating under a new use of force policy that emphasized sanctity of life, had to deal with the new requirement that officers intervene if they saw one of their colleagues engaged in misconduct. And none of it made any difference. This training is disconnected from the reality of the police mission, so that when we tell the police in the United States that they're waging a war on drugs and a war on crime and a war on gangs and a war on terror and a war on immigrants, you know, there's going to be violence, there's going to be racism and there's going to be demeaning behavior. And to think that we can fix this with some implicit bias training is a way of actually sweeping the political responsibility for these problems under the rug. We need to ask instead why our elected officials have declared all these wars on the public, in a way that absolves them of responsibility for widespread drug overdoses, for widespread untreated mental health problems, for widespread homelessness, etc. Instead of the state acknowledging that its policies have caused the social exclusion, they criminalize the behavior and place it in the hands of the police. What defund the police means is that we need to revisit this decision of turning every social problem over to the police to manage and instead redirect the billions of dollars that go into policing into community-based strategies of actually addressing these underlying problems. And in the process, making communities actually safer than they are now, because the reality is that policing is not particularly effective at producing public safety. And we have lots of examples of alternatives that really will work better. A starting point in Ireland might be to look at the recent budgetary commitment to employ 1,100 more people into unguarded shakana, an increase of 8% that lacks any evidence basis. Or instead, we could employ more social workers or mental health workers or build more houses. The question is how do we want to respond to social problems by policing them or addressing the harms that lie beneath? The commission on the future of policing was very clear on this. We need multi-agency responses to social problems. We should not always be calling the guards. Critically reflecting on what portion of our budget we want to spend on policing ahead of other essential less violent social services is not in any way anti-state or anti-police. It's a form of social responsibility. The solution to this isn't to make that surveillance and harassment more professional. It is to address what's driving the community problems in the first place that have caused us to turn these things over to police. To quit treating those very real problems as problems that only the police can address. And they have tried considerable reform to stop and search in the UK with very clear safeguards and monitoring put in place 20 years ago. But these procedural reforms achieve nothing. Disproportionate trends are not changing. It's still used in a really discriminatory manner. Have you ever known the guards to try and do something like maybe trying to improve relationships with the old people? No. No, never. In this episode, we've heard about the everyday experiences of two teenagers with the police in an Irish time. Their experiences have led them to have exceptionally negative feelings towards the guards. Neither of them have ever been arrested. Neither probably has a pull-century. And yet encounters which don't merit recording have had this kind of impact on them. They, and they say their friends, hate the guards. For those who don't have such experiences with the police, it's difficult to empathise with that response, but it's real. That's how they feel. Their views are no less important or less real because of their age. It's essential that we see the variety of experiences people are having with the police. And that we question what role we want the police to play in society. A huge thank you to Orlan Brendan for talking about something we don't hear about often enough. And to their mum who helped and consented to this. The context we get from Dr. John Topping and Professor Alex Fatale has really helped contextualise what's happening here. So thank you very much to them both. Alex's book is great if you want to think about these things more critically. Next week we speak to Joanna, whose son Noelle took his own life last year. I was after he was released from guard of custody. In such awful circumstances, Joanna tells us about her family's experiences. As ever, please support us in bringing this content to you by subscribing on patreon.com/tourashac recommending us to your friends and following us on twitter at Police Podcast. You might also want to check out Police The Beat, our new short series that takes a look at immediate policing events and activities.