Policing Control and Supervision Methods; The effect of the introduction of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission

This paper examines the introduction of the Garda Síochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) in Ireland and its background. Various types of police oversight models are described and discussed as is a wide range of relevant literature. The findings indicate that GSOC operates a “Mixed Model” involving both external review of police investigations and fully independent investigations into alleged police misbehaviour. International standards and practice suggest that there should be a level of civilian oversight of police complaints. The optimum model would be completely independent of the police and investigate all matters using civilian investigators. Despite the perception that there would be strong resistance to “outside interference” from police, Gardai express a preference for independent investigation of police complaints. Mediation seems unlikely to be used by GSOC due to its expense and limited scope. It is suggested in the course of interview that there is no significant evidence that independent oversight is more successful than the other models. An area for further research may be to establish a metric by which various methods of police oversight should be evaluated and then to ascertain whether independent oversight and investigation is more successful or not when measured against that metric