IT was the Kojak [Telly Savalas] sneer, a dry sort of chuckle through a sardonically bared set of teeth, it conveyed a worldly wisdom with a hard bitten sense of humour and was often followed by a "Who loves ya baby?" It replaced the "Hey, whatya lookin at?" pseudo innocent gesture of the Fonz, and 20 or so years ago young men were doing it throughout the English speaking world. It was cool, sounded sophisticated, streetwise, tough. Then.
Now it sounds simply cretinous, for we have since replaced the Kojak sneer with many fresher fads. The Kojak sneer is gone, and possibly in future years sociologists looking back on old archive footage of television drama of the mid 1970s will be mystified by the epidemic of strange, sneering, desiccated chuckles that erupted mimetically from young male mouths. The truth was that the Fonz look, the Kojak sneer or the Tony Curtis haircut were all of a piece with hoolahhoops, skateboards, Davy Crockett hats and, today, zero tolerance policing.
We can learn just, two important things about this phenomenon called zero tolerance policing, ZTP (pronounced, of course, with an American zed: ZeeTeePee). The first is merely further proof of how susceptible we are to any American concept, be it wholly and wildly inappropriate to Irish circumstances; and second is our mounting despair about crime.
Alien Concept
But to think that the application of ZeeTeePee makes any sense in Irish terms is like saying we should improve Telecom by installing the Los Angeles telephone exchange in Dublin. We are not a ZeeTeePee culture. We do not deal in absolutes. Our minds generally speaking - are trained in the habits of Celtic and Catholic casuistry. Our police force is recruited from the general population and possesses the very vices and the very virtues which make the Irish people so distinctly different from others.
ZeeTeePee is as alien to the Irish way of doing things as igloos are to Zulu Inkatha. ZeeTeePee makes no sense as a policing concept in isolation from the realities of Irish life; and it is almost beyond our powers to change those realities.
Take Aer Lingus, for example. Shining above all the incompetence, and a timekeeping that made the movement of demerara sugar look like a rat race, was the sheer Irishness of the Aer Lingus people one met, who were always ready to bend the rules just a little to make your journey that much more enjoyable.
ZeeTeePee could well kill those qualities of spontaneous tolerance, acceptance, forgiveness, cheerfulness. But even, if Aer Lingus got in a new Swiss managing director he probably could not prevent the small Hibernianesses that have made Aer Lingus so special. The staff would no doubt resort to subversive bootleg courtesy and to an under the counter generosity of spirit. That is the Irish way.
As with Aer Lingus, so with the Garda Siochana. Do we really want gardai punctually enforcing the licensing hours throughout Connemara on summer nights? Do we want motorists driving at 32mph in a 30mph zone to be flagged down and prosecuted? Do we want every busker and every street trader arrested and charged? Because that is what ZeeTeePee means. Zero tolerance means zero tolerance of your petty infringements, too.
Quick Fix
ZeeTeePee is not just another American import. It also conforms with the quick fix mentality of Irish politics. Got a problem? Ah, try our new policy superglue, which sticks all problems together in seconds, good as new. But, of course, political and social problems are not as amenable to correction as broken saucers. They need the patient application of concerted policy over time. And it has been the very absence of this which has enabled our crime problems to grow in the way they have.
All our major parties have been in power during the 10 years that crime has escalated beyond control and beyond counting. Our politicians remained inert, immobile and the Department of Justice supine and slumbering when the answer to what was happening was concerted policing by a properly managed force. They - and indeed we - were content with fudge, mismanagement. After a decade of nationwide institutional slovenliness, suddenly we think remedies can be conjured out of the sky by the cargo cult mantra ZeeTeePee.
But ZeeTeePee cannot be a realistic option if we want our gardai to be the nice, humane, discretionary humans they themselves want to be. And it, certainly is not an option in a legal culture which revels in bureaucracy, jurisprudential nitpicking and high fees. ZeeTeePee only works with a police force of germanised functionaries, a brisk, turnover conscious judiciary, and a legal system which allows policemen to levy instant fines and issue tickets which serve as court summonses.
Woeful Incompetence
As it is, our system is woefully incompetent at dealing with even our own concept of law enforcement, VZP: Virtually Zero Policing.
A parking fine requires the initial ticket, followed by two posted reminders, followed by a personally issued summons, which might take several visits, followed by the court appearance itself. And the fine for a process which perhaps costs the State at least a couple of hundred pounds? Fifteen pounds.
And if every minor offender, every busker and suburban 32mph driver wore charged in a ZeeTeePee Ireland, our present court system would be grid locked by minor offences within a week, and within a month its efficacy would compare poorly with Port au Prince's.
ZeeTeePee would, in fact, be considerably less effective at dealing with our crime wave than would teaching all our gardai the Kojak sneer; and a lot more.