Chair of police reform commission encourages US to look to Ireland
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Kathleen O'Toole
The chair of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland has urged US police forces to look to Ireland for lessons on police reform.
Kathleen O’Toole was chief of the Seattle Police Department when she was appointed in 2018 to lead the high-profile review of An Garda Síochána.
She was previously the inaugural chief inspector of the Garda Inspectorate and, prior to this, wast the first female commissioner of the Boston Police Department.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Ms O’Toole said US police forces could learn from the experience of community policing in Ireland, which she said has led to gardaí maintaining “good, strong links to the community”.
“Unfortunately, I think here in the States, we lost sight of the importance of that quite some time ago,” she said.
“Early in my career we were trained to go out and fight the war on crime. And it was really the police versus the community, as opposed to police working with the community.”
Ireland “is ahead of most US jurisdictions” on police accountability, she added, including in Northern Ireland.
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