O'Toole seeks a force to be reckoned with

DUBLIN -- Last month Kathleen M. O'Toole was at an international police conference in Belfast, listening as speaker after speaker described the force in Northern Ireland as a model for others around the world.

This was the same police force that, nine years ago, was so discredited among Catholics in Northern Ireland that O'Toole was part of a panel of experts convened to overhaul it, cementing the end of 30 years of conflict. Among those lauding the reformed, rebranded Police Service of Northern Ireland were her mentor, William J. Bratton, the chief in Los Angeles, and Paul F. Evans, the British government's chief of crime reduction -- both her immediate predecessors as Boston's police commissioner.

"As amazing as it was to listen to so many leaders in policing describe the PSNI in those glowing terms, it was also amazing to realize how fast real reform can take place if there's the commitment and the resources," O'Toole said.

It was the lack of resources that most frustrated O'Toole in Boston, as the murder rate rose on her watch. The pledges from an Irish government awash in cash enticed her to leave Boston for Dublin last summer to become chief of the Garda Inspectorate, which oversees the 14,000-member Garda Siochana , Ireland's national police force. "If you want to make changes, you've got to have resources," she said.

In her new job in the Irish Republic, O'Toole is seeking to replicate an overhaul she says is similar in scope to the one that took place in Northern Ireland.

While lacking the immediacy facing her and other members of the 1998 Patten Commission, so-named for Chris Patten, the British politician who headed it, O'Toole's job of recommending ways for the Garda to become a more modern force with state-of-the-art standards and equipment is no less ambitious or daunting.

Nine months into her three-year appointment, and with a major set of recommendations issued just last week, O'Toole is getting favorable reviews, even from some who were unsure that an American, albeit one of Irish ancestry with deep knowledge of policing on the island, could bring about real change.

But in issuing her first detailed set of recommendations -- about how police should respond to armed standoffs -- even those skeptical that O'Toole could serve as a catalyst said she showed herself unafraid to take on the government that appointed her.

Maurice Manning, president of the Irish Human Rights Commission, said O'Toole has "established herself in a very short space of time." He said last week's report demonstrated to police officers that she is sensitive to the dangers.

"The second job she has to do is show the public that she sees the need to reform very serious flaws in the structure, management, and culture of policing in Ireland," he said.

O'Toole and her staff are preparing a report that, when published later this year, will purport to do just that.

P.J. Stone , who heads the Garda Representative Association that represents some 10,000 rank-and-file officers, praises O'Toole's earnestness and willingness to consult ordinary police officers, even as he questions how much change she can bring about.

"I told her if she followed through on everything she wanted to do, she wouldn't be very long in her position," Stone said. "She laughed."

Stone said he believes that by constantly pointing out the shortcomings, O'Toole will undermine her own standing with the government, especially Justice Minister Michael McDowell, who lured her away from Boston.

But in an interview in her office overlooking St. Stephen's Green, O'Toole insisted there has been no government interference telling her to slow down -- just the opposite, she said.

"The Irish government is serious about reform," she said.

O'Toole, not quite given carte blanche, said she's been encouraged by McDowell and the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to help bring about systemic change. She said she has identified three key areas to improve: the visibility of officers, antiviolence strategies, and technology.

She was stunned to learn that no patrol cars had computers, recalling that in 1986 Bratton had hired her to oversee, among other things, the installation of computers in the cruisers of the now-defunct Metropolitan Police of Massachusetts. She also wants Irish police to emulate the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, an intelligence-sharing agency that was created for the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and is now considered a model by the US Department of Homeland Security.

O'Toole's report on armed standoffs made 84 recommendations, many of them citing deficiencies in training and equipment. For example, she called the Garda radio network "inadequate and outdated." She decried the fact that so few officers -- about 2,500 out of 14,000 -- have bullet-proof and stab-proof vests in a country where criminals increasingly use guns and knives.

Joe Dirwan , who heads the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, said his group noticed that many of the recommendations went directly to improving officer safety. He said an officer was nearly stabbed to death New Year's Eve, sustaining injuries a vest would have prevented.

"We have been looking for vests for five or six years," Dirwan said. "I think she has an appreciation of the risks out there."

O'Toole said that because the vast majority of Irish police officers are unarmed, there is an even greater need for better training and equipment. She recommended the creation of an armed response unit, more locally based, noting that the Garda's elite Emergency Response Unit made it to only 10 of the 73 sieges or standoffs in the country between 2000 and 2006.

Several commentators in the Irish media gave O'Toole credit for pointing out so many shortcomings in a system overseen by the same government that hired her. But police were especially impressed that she disputed some of the findings of a judge who had reviewed the handling of a 2000 siege in which police shot to death a mentally unstable man who had threatened them with a gun.

O'Toole's rebuke to Justice Robert Barr, who had suggested that police negotiators could have brought the victim's sister to the scene, was couched in diplomatic language. But she was adamant that negotiations had to be left to trained police officers.

O'Toole said she and her husband, Dan, a retired Boston police detective, have settled into Dublin easily. A portrait of Dan's late father, John O'Toole, a Boston police officer, hangs over the mantel in her office, which overlooks the bandstand in Dublin's signature park.

But in a city where she could be a regular in the social columns, she has kept a decidedly low profile.

"I have no desire to be a celebrity," she said.