From top; Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald; Dr Julien Mercille

The government is now using the pretext of gangland crime to boost its own powers.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

The wave of gangland crime continues. As expected, the government is now using this situation to further increase its powers over citizens. It’s called building a “Big Brother” State.

Indeed, last week, the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality, Frances Fitzgerald, outlined a series of worrying policies that the government intends to push through.

The measures include:

(1) Steps to facilitate the “interception of communications and for covert electronic surveillance”

This is exactly what Edward Snowden has been campaigning against to protect our privacy against governments that seek to snoop in our personal conversations and communications.

As of now, we already have a Big Brother State in Ireland because the government and the police can access at will the metadata about all our emails and phone calls, which are conserved for two years.

Karlin Lillington has written truly excellent reports on this in the Irish Times here and here, just like Digital Rights Ireland’s TJ McIntyre .

(2) Boost Garda powers by giving them more money and spreading their institutional reach: “all necessary financial resources will continue to be made available” to the police and international links with Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands will be explored to address international dimensions of crime.

Also, An Garda Síochána will establish a special Task Force focusing on criminals.

The problem with all this is that they’re the most ineffective ways to deal with drug problems, as I explained in previous articles here and here.

The most effective solutions are to provide adequate treatment to addicts, along with prevention campaigns. Reducing the demand for drugs will decrease the number and gravity of criminal acts that are caused by drug trafficking.

(3) It will now be easier for the Criminal Assets Bureau to seize assets and cash held by those suspected of crimes.

This called “civil forfeiture” and is used in some other countries as well. The significant part of this policy is that assets and cash can be seized before someone has been formally indicted in a formal trial. The proposed measures will lower the value of property and cash that may be seized from €13,000 to €5,000 (property) and from €6,500 to €1,000 (cash).

The danger with civil forfeiture is that it opens the door to abuse by law enforcement agents. They can use suspicions as a pretext to seize goods and cash from vulnerable people.

This is exactly what happened in the US, where the practice is used. There, police have literally stopped people on flimsy pretexts and taken their cash, cars and houses, which are then sold in an auction. The proceeds go back to the police departments, who use this practice as a good way to increase their own budgets.

There is an excellent article here on the subject. Of course, it is usually minorities that are arrested and have their property confiscated. Sure they can always launch lawsuits against the police to recover their property, but it is often prohibitively expensive, so that people tend to give up.

Such behavior on the part of Irish enforcement authorities may not be as extreme as in the US, but the Justice Department specified that the proposed measures would allow the Criminal Assets Bureau to target “the proceeds of crime held by middle to lower level actors in localised organised crime activity”, in addition to the assets of higher level actors.

It thus sounds like small dealers who got involved in drugs because of unemployment, and who are not responsible for orchestrating trafficking, will now be targets.

(4) A second Special Criminal Court will be established

The problem here is that Ireland’s Special Criminal Court has been denounced by a range of international and humanitarian organisations, including the United Nations and Amnesty International.

Special Criminal Courts open the door to abuses by the government in the appointment of judges for example, which can be political. The courts also can be less transparent and arbitrary.

In summary, the government is now using the pretext of gangland crime to boost its own powers.

There are well-known, effective ways to address drug violence, including treatment of addicts and decriminalisation of drugs, but the government is not interested in them—in other words, it is not interested in seriously addressing the problems.

It is more concerned with increasing its own (arbitrary) powers.

Of course, all of the above measures could be defended in theory.

For example, we could imagine, in theory, a government truly dedicated to the well-being of Irish people, which would only seize assets of dangerous criminals without formally finding them guilty of anything; which would establish Special Criminal Courts only in very specific circumstances while using them sparingly and impartially.

We can also imagine a police force truly dedicated to tackling white-collar crime as much as petty crime. And we can imagine a government that only snoops on emails and phone calls made by real criminals.

If all that was the case, one could argue that those measures would make some sense.

However, the real world teaches very different lessons.

Why open the door to governmental abuses of power? Why do so especially when there are well-known solutions to the problems we face that do not involve giving any more arbitrary powers to the government?

It is interesting that politicians who regularly claim to be in favour of “small government” and “cutting government waste” have become cheerleaders for more government bureaucracy and more government power over our lives.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille