Debate contribution: Policing Resources

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 9 September 2024.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

9 September 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Policing Resources

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4511732

Read the official Assembly record

Text

We desperately need to invest in our health service, hospitals, GP services, mental health provision, and drug addiction and rehab services. We need to invest in schools to provide pupils with the best opportunities and to improve the lives of so many young people affected by educational underachievement. We need to invest in our welfare system to overturn the two-child tax limit and other cruel welfare reforms that have condemned so many to a life of poverty. We need to invest in public and community services across the board to provide people with a better standard of living. We need to invest in housing and to end homelessness. We need to invest in workers' wages, tax the rich and redistribute the vast wealth in our society in order to eradicate poverty, social alienation and the destitution forced on so many by this Government. Crime emerges from those social problems. Desperate want causes mental ill health. Poverty and inequality cause people to steal. Deprivation leads to violence. It is under the crushing economic policies of Stormont and Westminster that sectarianism and the racist violence witnessed in recent weeks grow and fester as working-class people turn on one another over the failures of the state. Lack of income and lack of access to housing, healthcare and the basic necessities of life are the problems, and we cannot police our way out of them. There are no prizes for guessing why Executive parties seem more concerned about policing resources than fixing the problems from which crime grows. It is because the Government feel that it is easier and cheaper to police working-class communities than to deal with the social ills that they face. In communities where one in five children lives in poverty, it is easier for the PSNI to stop and search people and to intimidate, harass and police them than it is for the Government to grasp why it has to be this way. Poverty, lack of opportunity, alienation and crime are not inevitable, but throwing more resources at the police is definitely not the answer. That is why I will not be supporting the motion. The problem goes much deeper. If we are talking about additional resources, we should ask what those resources are for and who exactly will be policed as a result. If we look at the record of the PSNI, we will have our answer. It is a police force that is rife with misogyny, with one report citing widespread misconduct, including sexual predation, misogyny, domestic abuse and the use of misogyny in social media groups. The same PSNI has actively discriminated against black and ethnic minority communities and attempted to criminalise the Black Lives Matter movement. It is the same institutionally racist police force that reports migrants who are victims of crimes, including domestic abuse, to the Home Office. It refused to act appropriately on racist violence, allowing far-right thugs to rampage in south Belfast, and then had the gall to tell us that loyalist paramilitaries, under the guise of community leaders, have a role to play in stopping racism. Amnesty International, one of the world's leading human-rights organisations, tells us that people from ethnic minority communities are almost twice as likely to be stopped and searched by the PSNI. Think about that for a second: twice as likely. In 2022, Amnesty International reported that Irish Travellers were the ethnic group most targeted for stop-and-search. In 2021, journalists from "The Detail" revealed that, over a five-year period, the PSNI stopped and searched twice as many Catholics as it did working-class people from a Protestant background. That is the two-tier policing that is worth talking about, but sure throw more money at the problem anyway. Not only does the PSNI risk the safety of young people through the use of child informants, it continues the horrendous practice of strip-searching children. Last year, we heard that 27 children were strip-searched in 2021. For those who do not know what that entails, those children were arrested and asked to remove their clothes by the police, with just one child being accompanied by an appropriate adult. What was found as a result of those blatant abuses of children's rights? In 24 of 27 cases, nothing, zero, zilch.

I will, yes.

Well, it depends what the problem is. The Member needs to clarify his example. It is funny that the Member's party always talks about protecting children, often under the guise of undermining relationships and sexuality education (RSE), but when it comes to stopping and searching and harassing young people and the police's use of powers on young people, there is, unsurprisingly, not a word. To continue, one search uncovered a mobile phone and two a small quantity of drugs. When it comes to investigating the most serious crimes, such as murder by the state and its paramilitary proxies, the PSNI has been to the fore in denying families justice and covering up Troubles-related crimes that were carried out by its predecessor organisation. I will also not vote for any motion that commits more resources to a force that continues to fire plastic bullets at working-class children, be they in Sandy Row, the Ormeau, the Falls or the Shankill. Again, there is nothing from the party next to me when it comes to protecting those children and young people. The PSNI has serious problems, but resourcing is nowhere near the worst of them. It has problems with misogyny, racism, sectarianism, state violence and the heavy policing of working-class communities. Instead of committing more resources to the police, we should commit them to improving the lives of oppressed people who find themselves in an inescapable cycle of crime thanks to the policies of this Executive and previous and current Westminster Governments.

959 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:58 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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