Should the new local community safety partnerships meet in public?

Until recently, issues around community safety and policing in the city were teased out by joint policing committees (JPCs) covering different areas.

Part of the remit of JPCs was to organise public meetings, say guidelines issued in 2014, with a presumption that media and anyone interested could in most cases attend.

This year, the Department of Justice is set to replace those JPCs with a new structure, called local community safety partnerships.

But it is unclear whether media and the wider public will be allowed at these. A pilot for the north inner-city, which started in July 2021, has met in private.

While some meetings or parts of meetings might need to be private because of confidentiality or other legal issues, they should in general be open to the public as much as possible, say some criminologists and councillors.

“There would certainly be a benefit in the things that happen in those meetings being a matter of public record,” says Ian Marder, an assistant professor in criminology at Maynooth University.

“Ireland has a bit of a problem with transparency anyway, and that exists across the public sector and civil service,” he said. “In the criminal justice sector that is quite acute.”

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner and Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey say that the outgoing joint policing committees had clearer structures for accountability and transparency than the new partnerships.

The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a query sent Friday asking whether local community safety partnership meetings will be public.

Transparent and accountable

The guidelines for  joint policing committees said that they should make their reports and documents available to the public as much as possible – although some meetings could be held in private if necessary.

“The presumption is that members of the public … and representatives of the media … are entitled to be present at a meeting of a JPC and information and documents produced for the JPC are to be available to them,” the rules said, unless there are legal or confidentiality reasons stopping that.

JPCs had to arrange and host public meetings concerning matters affecting the policing of the local authority’s administrative area, said the guidelines.

In Dublin, the citywide JPC was open to people to watch if they registered for it and press often attended. Other meetings, of the JPCs for each council local administrative area, were held in private.

Horner, the Green Party councillor, says that when she first joined the council she was concerned that the JPC structure didn’t have enough teeth.

In retrospect though, they were more transparent than the local community safety partnerships and had a clearer agenda, she says.

When they were announced, local community safety partnership were put forward by the Department of Justice as a way to link local people to state agencies and get a wide range of stakeholders working together to make neighbourhoods feel safer.

In July 2021, a local community safety partnership pilot kicked off in the north inner-city, covering the area from Arbour Hill to Dublin Port, including Ballybough, East Wall, Smithfield and the areas in between.

The aim has been to bring together public representatives with youth workers, social workers, community development workers, residents’ groups, and the Gardaí, to brainstorm ways to make the area safer.

Horner, who sat on the partnership for the last three years, says that the community safety partnerships are meant to be collaborative. “We were told as councillors that it’s not our role to interrogate.”

Collaborative working is good, she says, but visibility, accountability, and transparency are also important.

“It’s not clear what the objective is,” says Horner. “There is no agenda, no resources and no obligation on agencies to implement things.”

Horner says she doubts the public would want to watch the community safety partnership meetings even if they were available online. They’re not that interesting, she says.

More community representatives would engage if the partnerships had more power, she says. “If people knew that decisions would actually be implemented, they might show up.”

Lacey, the Labour councillor, says that moving from a public process to one that takes place in private is a blow to democracy. The new structures are less accountable than the outgoing ones, he says.

“In general, public work should be done in public,” he says.

“If there is some specific issue I’d have no objection to some closed meetings,” he says, like discussing individual cases.

Lacey is strongly of the view that it is the job of elected representatives to be a voice for the public and to hold civil servants to account, he says. “The basic principle is that elected people decide and officials do.”

It’s important that as much information as possible is made public, says criminologist Trina O’Connor.

Working-class communities are policed in a different way to middle-class communities, and can have a strained relationship with the Gardaí, she says.

Community safety partnerships offer an opportunity to bring communities on board, and for their representatives to engage directly with Gardaí, she says.

“Anything that can be public should be public,” says O’Connor. “Honesty and honest conversations are key.”

Like Lacey, she says parts of meetings may have to be in camera. “I think you might be dealing with individual cases of drug-related intimidation,” she says.

What is the goal?

The government’s latest thinking on community safety partnerships, and how the pilots have gone isn’t quite clear.

A promised evaluation of how the pilot project in the north inner-city went still hasn’t been published.

The format of the community safety partnerships should depend on what their main purpose is, says Marder, the criminologist.

If it is to be a public forum for the community to engage with the Gardaí and the other lead agencies it should be accessible to the public, he says.

If the main goal is to facilitate multi-agency collaboration it might meet mostly in private, said Marder.

In some areas, agencies like the HSE, An Garda Síochana and drug services are probably cooperating in ways that are very useful, engaging in informal collaborations, he says.

“If this is going to be good, it is about facilitating multi-agency cooperation,” says Marder, “it’s recognising that community safety is not exclusively a policing question.”

One challenge is to get the right people around the table but another challenge is to maximise the benefit of the time they spend together. “There should be structured dialogue,” he says.

Each of the representatives should also be given actions to complete, and to do that they need to have sufficient time and authority to implement what is decided in the multilateral meetings, he says.

Community safety partnerships in England and Wales meet in private, he says. “When it was first set up, people felt like it was a tick-box exercise: you go, no one had any actions allocated to them.”

In Ireland, The Policing Authority holds some meetings in public and also has some private meetings, Marder says, so that could be a potential model for the community safety partnerships.

It’s possible that public access may vary in different places if it is down to a chairperson to decide on the level of access, he says. “It’s not obvious to me how consistently they are going to be structured.”

Horner, the Green Party councillor, says she supports the multi-agency approach but in her experience on the north inner-city partnership, there was a lack of transparency, clear objectives and definite outcomes.

“This model isn’t working,”  she says. “Let’s fix it instead of just ignoring the problems and rolling it out across the country.”