Instead of more peelers, can we have more of the people who can reduce the workload of the police?

Chief Constable Jon Boutcher is in the news, asking for 200 million to help increase police numbers from 6300 to 7000. The PSNI is starting a recruitment drive tomorrow should any of you fancy a career change.

As I have said before, being a peeler must be one of the worst jobs in Northern Ireland. You spend half your time babysitting drunks and drug addicts, getting involved in tedious neighbour disputes, getting caught in the middle of warring couples, waking people up at 3am to tell them their kid is dead in a car crash and being first on the scene for a suicide/rape/murder. It’s a lot, and it’s no wonder a lot of them are burned out.

Then there is the issue with Catholic recruitment to the PSNI or lack thereof. I don’t consider this a major problem; as I have written before, catholic parents do not want their kids to be peelers, with the main reason that it is a lousy job (see above), they would much rather their kids have a cushy life being a solicitor, barrister or any of the other nice jobs where no spide off his face on various substances can try to stab them. For many Catholics, they are happy that their kids have the option to become police officers; they just choose not to.

Rather than giving the PSNI more money, I am of the defund the police mindset and would lower their budget. Defunding the police is not being anti-police but rather taking a step back and looking at how the police spend their time and resources and how we can reduce crime in the first place.

I have heard some estimates say that half of all police time is spent doing tasks that more fall into the category of social work, dealing with people with addictions, mental health issues, and other social problems. There is a lot of truth to the jibe that police officers are social workers with guns. Social services are massively under-resourced, and the police are being forced to take up the slack as there is no one else to deal with the problem. Whatever recruits to the PSNI imagined they would be doing, I don’t think sitting for 10 hours in the A&E unit babysitting addicts was on their radar, but that is the reality of a lot of the work.

If we properly resource social services, there would be less need to involve the police.

If we turn our attention to crime, a lot of crime in Northern Ireland is low-level stuff that primarily is a result of poverty and anti-social behaviour. Criminalising this is the worst way possible to deal with it both on moral and financial grounds. If a wee smickers steals a car you can understand the public demand to lock the wee ballix up but if they knew that it costs 300k a year to put someone in a young offenders centre, that it also costs tens of thousands in police time, court time, solicitor and barrister fees and that it’s all absolutely feckin pointless as we can have an 80% reoffending rate and these characters will spend their lives under the ‘care’ of public agencies until their inevitable early and tragic deaths.

As Brendan Behan once observed “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse”. Very often, police can make a situation worse not better. This is not their fault, they have a completely different skillset and powers that are not always appropriate to the situation. If you are fighting with your neighbours over parking then two armoured police cars with lights flashing rocking up is really not going to improve the situation.

Instead, we should concentrate resources on interventions that reduce crime. Things like youth programmes, sure start programmes, more money for schools in poorer areas, better nutrition and public health in poorer areas, better housing and support. But we don’t do this, we actually CUT the money we give to these things because as a society we think more peelers and prison spaces arethe solution.

To be clear to any peelers reading this I am not anti-police, I think you do a very tough job. You deserve more money and better support. But what I want is you not to have to deal with all the social work nonsense so you can get on the the job of dealing with real crime. I am sure we are both on the same page there.

I think we need to look at a new model of emergency services. I like the first responders model you get in the US. I can see it being helpful that someone is called to appropriate incidents like domestic and neighbour disputes, and they can decide on the best course of action. There also needs to be more addiction services and mediation and family services. A lot of issues are not strictly criminal, more often than not you are dealing with unfortunates who lead chaotic lives, usually with addiction and mental health issues. It should not be the police’s job to deal with these social problems. We need to get this work off their plates and fund the people who are better equipped to handle these problems.

But we won’t because we dislike changing or trying new working methods. We repeatedly make the same mistakes and act surprised when nothing changes or improves.

Brian O'Neill

Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.