George Nkencho was killed by a white police service

As recently as 2017, there were zero Gardaí of African or Caribbean descent

Jan 15, 2021

Photo taken from An Garda Síochána’s Careersservice.ie page. Can you spot what these candidates have in common?

“The Garda Síochána will succeed not by force of arms or numbers, but on their moral authority as servants of the people.”

- Michael Staines, first commissioner of An Garda Síochána Na hÉireann, 1922

Two and a half weeks ago, a young black man named George Nkencho died after being shot three times by an Armed Support Unit of An Garda Síochána.

Gardaí have defended their use of lethal force, alleging that Nkencho was brandishing a knife at them. They also contend that firearms were only the final step in a “graduated policing response”, which first included the use of pepper spray and tasers.

But the protestors who gathered the following day outside Nkencho’s local police station in Blanchardstown questioned the necessity of such drastic measures. “Why couldn’t more than fifteen Gardaí disarm one man?” asked Emmanuel Nkencho, George’s younger brother. Others have been more explicit in their questions. Appearing on the podcast Policed, Nana Nubi, who is currently researching An Garda Síochána with the University of Limerick and who was a childhood friend of George Nkencho, had this to say:

“We’ve heard reports in the community of alleged police brutality, particularly among young black males… and I know myself, I have a brother who’s a typical 6’4” black guy from Blanch, so we do have conversations with him about being cautious and careful… Of course the police are very much entitled to police and to protect, however we’ve heard there are allegations against the police where when they have interacted with people of African descent, there has been use of abusive, racist language by An Garda Síochána... So of course the community is saying, “Is there racism here? Should we be afraid? Are we safe?”

The facts of the case at hand will continue to be debated in and out of court, but it’s doubtful whether any conclusion will inspire confidence on the part of ethnic minority communities. As long ago as 2005, An Garda Síochána was found to be institutionally racist by an external audit. iReport, an online system established in 2013 as an alternative means of reporting racist incidents, collates evidence of police discrimination in their publications. The reports are damning, revealing systematic patterns of Gardaí surveilling, threatening, or harassing ethnic minorities across the country, in some cases on a daily basis. Beyond this active discrimination are countless sins of omission. Evidence from as far back as the original 2005 report consistently finds Gardaí refusing service to ethnic minorities, neglecting to report hate crimes, and allowing anti-racist efforts from within the service to wither on the vine.

The public mourning of George Nkencho is about more than the grief and grievance of the moment. The fact is that many black Irish people believe that the police in this country do not represent them.

Those black Irish people are correct.

The problem

As recently as 2017, the head of the Garda Representative Association reported that exactly zero of the 10,500 men and women serving in An Garda Síochána were of African or Caribbean descent. 63 Gardaí were drawn from all other ethnic minorities combined. A substantial recruiting drive has taken place since then, but no official statistics have been published reporting a change in composition. In response to a Freedom of Information request, I was told that while application forms do contain a voluntary question asking applicants about their ethnic background, the Public Appointments Service does not, as a matter of course, share this information with An Garda Síochána. But we know from the 2017 statistics that it is possible for the Gardaí to collate this information when they want to, they just normally don’t.

As scandals have piled up around An Garda Síochána in the last decade, a small cottage industry of inquiries and NGOs has emerged with the stated aim of publishing reports on What Is To Be Done About All This. In each of these reports, some version of the following sentence appears: “An Garda Síochána’s failure to reform is partially attributable to a deep-rooted culture of insularity and conservatism – until that culture changes, there can be no meaningful improvement in our policing services.” But let’s take this criticism seriously: cultures of conservatism don’t just change on their own – that’s what makes them conservative cultures. Police reform is politically difficult because it has to be imposed from the outside. Voices from within the service will howl with indignation as external actors try to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century.

A solution

But what if we could bring the outside inside? As it stands, the insularity of our white police service produces hostility towards the increasingly diverse communities they’re supposed to be serving. But in the context of an integrated service, that same insularity might serve as the basis for a solidarity which cuts across racial lines and drives social change. Perhaps you’re more sceptical than I am that Gardaí from ethnic minority communities could change the attitudes of their colleagues, but even that itself is a reason to integrate. The more intractable racists there are patrolling the streets today, the more important it is that we have better examples to replace them.

The evidence in favour of representation is robust. Research from America shows that white police officers are five times more likely to fire their gun in black neighbourhoods than are black officers. Black officers are also less likely than white officers to issue citations to black citizens for minor crimes like traffic offences. An officer’s race also influences whether they give black citizens too little attention. When courts ordered U.S. police departments to recruit more black officers, the black-white victimization gap shrank as black people became less likely to have crimes committed against them. This follows a pattern established by similar laws requiring female recruitment in the 1970s: reporting of domestic violence went up, but rates of spousal homicide went down.

The challenges

Perhaps you’ll want to see evidence from Ireland before you’re convinced these policies will work here. If so, I commend your commitment to evidentiary rigour, but it doesn’t change the policy recommendation. In order to study the effect of hiring Gardaí from ethnic minority backgrounds, we first have to hire Gardaí from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Of course, this is an issue of supply as well as demand. Previous efforts at diversification have floundered and it’s not clear how the current wave of schemes and programmes are any different. “Join your country’s racist police service to make it less racist” is a hard sell for Irish people of colour who have grown up witnessing the failings of the system.

There is evidence on how to make police work appealing to marginalised communities, but it’s possible that the decisive variable will simply be whether the Gardaí put their money where its mouth is. The big corporations which now employ all my old college friends dedicate a substantial share of their time and resources to targeted recruitment, and our police service should do the same. If that means moving resources away from other commendable activities, then so be it. This must be a priority.

Diversification will not guarantee integration. Gardaí who resent the presence of ethnic minorities in their workplace will direct that resentment toward the new recruits. To some extent, this will be unavoidable, and maybe even a good sign: the point is to challenge institutional norms, after all. But if we want new recruits to stick around, or better yet, encourage others to follow in their footsteps, they will have to feel like sticking around is worth their while. Senior Gardaí must take a zero tolerance approach to racism within the service. Recent history does not bode well for such prospects, but that’s all the more reason to double down on diversification – the better represented minority groups are, the harder they will be to ignore.

Nor do the problems of An Garda Síochána begin and end with discrimination. Part of the reason why there has been so little discussion of diversity within An Garda Síochána is that the last decade of Irish police discourse has been continuously dominated by stories of mismanagement and corruption. Meanwhile, the establishment of Armed Support Units of the kind responsible for George Nkencho’s death represent troubling a move toward the militarised police forces of Britain and America. In the U.S., misconduct on the part of these neighbourhood soldiers has led many to question the value of even having a police service. Diversification will be a necessary but not sufficient condition for a functioning Irish police service.

The opportunity

Before concluding, it’s worth noting that policing is not the only area where Ireland suffers from a serious diversity deficit. An Garda Síochána are a legitimate authority only because they are accountable to our democratically elected representatives. But the Dáil is no more representative of the Irish people than the police service they oversee. To this day, Leo Varadkar is the only Dáil member of an ethnic background that we have ever had. If this is news to you, perhaps you should take a look at who’s giving us our news. If you wish you’d been taught sooner about the importance of representation, think about who has been teaching you.

Changing society is hard. Most social policies don’t have their intended effect, and many of them backfire completely. The reason is a lack of good evidence on what works. Policies that work in one context often falter when applied to another, and much of what works in small settings cannot be scaled up to the level of a society. If a policy can be quantitatively proven to work again and again in context after context, that policy deserves to be placed at the centre of our theories of change. Descriptive representation – ensuring that the people who provide a service resemble those they are serving, is just such a policy.

Whether that policy gets implemented is up to us.

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