IN the past year there has been unprecedented political activity in criminal justice. This has occurred against a backdrop of increased public fear, generated largely by a series of ghastly crimes against women.

The new dynamism is also a response to the received wisdom that for the electorate more effective law enforcement is an urgent priority.

Initiatives include a commitment to another 800 prison places and to an independent prisons board and courts authority, the creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau, the return, under a new name, of the Murder Squad, and the amendment to the Constitution to allow for preventive detention.

Some of these are sensible and overdue, others rushed and ill considered. What they share is their origin in the desire of political leaders to appear tough on crime.

The Fianna Fail policy document on crime, published last week, is a transparent exercise in raising the stakes. It is in the deplorable populist tradition of Irish politics on criminal justice where the opposition exploits public concern and panders to the vocal, reactionary wing of public opinion that offers simplistic solutions based on the need for ever more punitive law enforcement.

If the Coalition Government provides 800 prison places and 700 new gardai, then Fianna Fail in opposition will promise 2,000 prison places and 1,200 gardai. This reckless outbidding is never based on cool, informed analysis and largely ignores the nature and extent of crime in our society and the essential work of tackling its causes.

THE aspect of Fianna Fail's crime policy that has captured the public imagination, however, is its promotion of the latest "magic bullet" import from the US zero tolerance policing. This has been oversold to the Irish public on the basis of its inherent attractions for a society that perceives itself to be increasingly at the mercy of a predatory criminal class.

Many people long for a society in which citizens are safe from teenage gangs and minor street hassles. There is some logic in the view that if the Garda prevented minor misdemeanours, more serious confrontational crimes would be less likely. But these high hopes for zero tolerance are totally unrealistic and unworkable.

Zero tolerance has also been oversold on claims that its introduction in New York City has led directly to substantial reduction in serious crime and safer streets. The jury, in the sense of careful scientific evaluation, is still out on the reality of zero tolerance as practised by New York police and on the contribution of zero tolerance to genuine, recent reduction in crime in that city.

New York's size, its police payroll (as large as our criminal justice budget) and its utterly different and more serious crime culture are compelling reasons for caution. It would also be unwise to buy naively into a notion so energetically hyped by a notoriously politicised police administration.

The Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, is to be congratulated for taking an independent line and resisting the groundswell of unthinking Irish political and popular opinion in favour of zero tolerance. Mr Byrne has rightly questioned the validity of a zero tolerance approach here.

Prof Rod Morgan, co author of The Future of Policing, reinforces this call for caution with his devastating critique of the zero tolerance approach. Morgan makes two main points. First, the terminology itself makes no sense because the police simply do not have and never will have the capacity to enforce all the laws all the time. In Britain about 7 per cent of serious crimes leads to a conviction.

WHEN the dark figure of unreported crime is included in calculations, a similar statistic for punished crime applies to Irish indictable crimes. If we broaden the net to include minor offences like speeding and not having a dog licence the proportion of offending that is prosecuted and punished diminishes almost to vanishing point.

It is a nonsense to suggest that applying the full weight of the law to every person caught out in a minor infringement would result in a more law abiding society. For one thing much police time would be lost which could be devoted to the prevention and investigation of serious crime.

Substantial police discretion to pursue or otherwise minor offending is inevitable if the system is not to grind to a halt and become self defeating.

Morgan's second point is that zero tolerance is a serious misnomer because it inevitably means highly selective enforcement against particularly visible target groups such as the homeless, beggars, drunks and aimless teenagers. So the only form of zero tolerance that could be practised would be severely discriminatory.

Most advocates assume this but refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, zero tolerance of the middle classes is unlikely to be tolerated by the middle classes for long - it is a policy for "them", not "us". Selective zero tolerance is a dangerous road; it will create barriers of resentment and bitterness in those deprived communities crying out for bridgebuilding and community style policing.

Zero tolerance is attractive because it evokes the utopian vision of an almost crime free society. But the policing methodology it proposes as the means of achieving the ideal is deeply flawed. A more civil, courteous, law abiding and less aggressive community is to be profoundly desired but it cannot be achieved by law enforcement alone.

Positive communal values must emerge from the individual and the community. Intolerant, authoritarian police states can stamp out antisocial behaviour but always at the huge and intolerable cost of oppression.

Dr Paul O'Mahony is a psychologist and criminologist. He is author of Criminal Chaos: Seven Crises in Irish Criminal Justice recently published by Round Hall Sweet and Maxwell.