It won’t be news to many people that I am not surprised at the conclusions of the Crowe Report, published recently, and concluding that: Some Gardai working in Roads Policing – a minority, but nonetheless a noticeable one – are unproductive and appear to be demotivated and unconcerned with doing an effective, professional job.

While the report did not deal with reports made by the public through traffic watch, I have experienced some Gardai who have been helpful at first, but others where the handling of reports submitted to them is at best hostile and could be construed as appearing to be focussed on avoiding having to process such reports or to prosecute driving offences, which have effectively been handed to them on a plate. In many cases, a significant delay in dealing with reports could discourage members of the public from engaging at all.

The report is available on the Garda website at this link so you can read it yourself and draw your own conclusions, but here are some of my thoughts below.

The report shows a big variation in work by different members of the RPU and across The divisions which the report looked at are not named but include 6 of the 21 divisions (the data from one division caused statistical reliability problems). It would be expected, although it is not clear that there would be an appropriate mix of urban and rural areas, and that at least one division would be in the Dublin Metropolitan region.

One of the divisions looked at had lower rates of detection of speeding and other offences of between a third and a half of the more productive divisions.

It was also clear that there are some Gardai that buck the trend and take their work seriously.

A few weeks ago, the Mail on Sunday newspaper featured an article (available on the PressReader here) where a person reporting dangerous driving by the Gardai was told that the reports would not be accepted, and that the reported would be reported to the Data Commissioner for breaching GDPR. Other Gardaí have told cyclists that they would have to take their cameras as evidence if they wished to have the incidents investigated.

In Newcastle County Court in Britain a judge recently ruled that a cyclist was within their rights in recording a driver with a camera and that it did not breach data privacy laws in reporting this to the police. (See report here) It is not likely that the law will differ greatly within the EU, and it does look like recording your own journey with a GoPro, dashcam, bike video camera or even a ring doorbell, and then submitting reports to authorities is considered appropriate and does not require a person to register as a data commissioner (I am by profession a pharmacist and not a lawyer and would recommend that you speak to such if you have any doubts)

In summary, my experience, and the Crowe report suggests that the Gardai do not have the stomach to go against the “windscreen view” that modern cars are safer, that drivers can do no wrong, and that a little bit of lawbreaking is ok. The number of people feeling that they can’t cycle or let their children walk to school because of the danger on the roads is the other side of that. If we can’t make people feel safe we cannot shift people to active travel, and we won’t tackle the climate crisis. Getting the Gardai to help by enforcing the law is just one part of that, but an essential starting point.