Properly trained and professional police would not have acted as gardaí did in Dublin this week, argues Ian Doyle, a former member of the Metropolitan Police in London
Professional police officers are no strangers to violence. At least once a week, a police officer will have to use violence, usually more. I term it violence not to sugar-coat it by calling it reasonable force. No force is reasonable nor is there such a thing as excessive force.
To place an unwilling suspect in handcuffs requires nothing short of brute strength. You cannot arrest a resistant, fully grown, adult male without using all the strength and violence you have in you.
However, I found it difficult to understand why a small number of gardaí were operating during a large-scale public order event last Monday without their epaulettes on. No self-respecting professional police officer would parade for duty without wearing their shoulder numbers, much less be allowed by their supervisor to leave the station in such a state of undress.
You'll notice again, I use the word professional. Professionalism and integrity go hand in hand.
The baton is certainly still a valid tactical option available to a modern police force and should continue to be one, but to see a garda without shoulder numbers repeatedly beating cowering protesters with a baton is definitely a disturbing sight.
It is the training of the Metropolitan Police in London (in the use of batons in officer safety scenarios) to extend your free arm, palm outstretched in a defensive manner, while shouting verbal commands and moving backwards to create a reactionary gap. If this space were to be breached, you might then justifiably strike your advancing attacker.
There aren't many police officers who would resort to the baton as their primary tactical option. Metropolitan Police officer safety training also lists the head as part of a "red zone", a potentially fatal target, to be struck only as a last resort in a life-and-death situation.
On Monday, we saw gardaí ignoring any other possible tactical options, verbal commands or indeed demonstrator-removal techniques, and going straight in with baton strikes to the heads of unarmed civilians.
The Garda Síochána is an old-fashioned police force with little or no concept of accountability. I would rather no one else but it running to my aid in the middle of the night in the event of a burglary. Conversely, if I were to find myself a suspect in Garda custody or facing gardaí during a demonstration, I think I would be terrified.
Maybe it's no bad thing for the criminal element in this city to fear their police, but for normal, decent people exercising their rights to freedom of expression and speech, to also fear their police is again disturbing. It must be said, I would feel the same trepidation when facing any police officer in a confrontational situation, be they a garda or a London constable.
The reasons are as follows:
One: all human beings are subject to the "fight or flight" syndrome. This is where, during a confrontation, adrenaline is pumped to the parts of the body required for fighting or alternatively to the parts of the body required for fleeing. For a police officer, flight is simply not an option;
Second: there will always be premeditation among one or two police officers who will remove any identifying numbers and enter the fray bent on violence, just as there will always be a violent and disruptive element among the protesters;
Third: there will always be certain young and inexperienced police officers present who are not accustomed to confrontation, be it physical or otherwise.
These officers will not be capable of conducting either an adequate risk-analysis or a threat assessment (possibly due to fear) and will invariably choose an inappropriate tactical option.
THE point is this. There is no black and white, no good and evil, only normal people who, despite their uniforms and power, are susceptible to fear, panic, aggression and adrenaline, just like the rest of us. It poses a difficult dilemma.
Do we want a paper tiger, a politically correct guard dog with no teeth, like London's Met Police has become since the inquiry into its handling of the killing of a black youth, Stephen Lawrence? Or do we want the guard dog that is ruthlessly effective yet sometimes bites the hand that feeds it?
Could we strike any sort of balance?
• Ian Doyle was a constable in the Metropolitan Police from 1999 to 2002, serving in Uxbridge and, in Paddington, as a member of the Territorial Support Group, which deals among other things in crowd control