You might think that after a few times the gardaí in the area would have known his name, but they continued to ask it, as if going through the motions, or maybe to get under his skin. He felt embarrassed, belittled.

Another was brought to the station after a stop-and-search routine. At the station, one of the gardaí pulled back from the youth, and said: “I don’t want to catch anything off you.”

A young girl in the same area related how she felt after repeatedly encountering gardaí on the street: “I felt so small, as if I wasn’t even dirt under their feet.”

These are the experiences of a group of young people in Rialto, in Dublin’s south inner city, which were related at a forum on policing on Wednesday evening last week in the city centre.

The experiences were collected for a project called Policing Dialogue, run by the Rialto Youth Project. Twenty six garda recruits sat down with the young people and read aloud their accounts.

“One young person said this (the reading) was a fantasy of his,” Fiona Whelan, an artist and organiser of the project, told the forum.

“Another asked a garda ‘do you ever say sorry, when it’s [a stop-and-search] in the wrong’?”

The forum was organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, on foot of a submission it has made to the Commission on the Future of Policing.

The commission is scheduled to report in September, in what is expected to be a blueprint for radical reform of the force.

Its work was deemed necessary because of the scandals that have impacted on the force in recent years, in particular the treatment of garda whistleblowers. But since it was announced, in February 2017, other scandals, such as the phantom breath tests and financial irregularities at Templemore, have emphasised the sense of crisis.

But other aspects of policing also need to be addressed. Human rights abuses are an occupational hazard for police forces all over the world. This manifests itself most prominently in the treatment of minorities, and quite often young people in areas of economic disadvantage.

As circumstances dictate that these areas are often where violent crime and drug crime fester, some police treat everybody as a potential suspect, rather than as a citizen. At best, this is lazy, at worst, a flagrant abuse of human rights.

The ICCL submission, entitled, Rights-Based Policing: How Do We Get There? puts forward the case for human rights to be at the heart of reform.

“Much good work has been done, over many years, by those within and outside An Garda Síochána, to ensure human rights inform Irish policing. However, these efforts have not penetrated throughout the organisation and have not been effective in providing solutions to management and operational problems that continue to dog the organisation,” ICCL director Liam Herrick states in the submission.

One element of human rights discussed on Wednesday last week concerned how a cavalier or indiscriminate approach to stop-and-search can impact on young people. Ms Whelan said that training is absent in this area.

The project in which she is involved sought and received engagement from the chief superintendent in the south inner city.

At one point, the Rialto Project travelled to Templemore to provide input into training.

However, shaved resources in the force drained enthusiasm for this kind of policing.

Solicitor Garth Noble has long experience in working with children who come into contact with the criminal justice and care systems.

“They get why we need the police, but their experiences with An Garda Síochána are pretty negative. A number are able to identify individual gardaí whom they had a positive experience with.”

Stop-and-search is a particular problem, he said. Gardaí require “reasonable cause” to do it, but that is often not referenced at all, he pointed out. Issues frequently arise about “obstruction” in these situations.

“They’re seen as troublemakers,” he said of young people who are subjected to stop-and-search.

“Often, the attitude is ‘they’re out to do no good’.”

Mr Noble also pointed to the section of the Public Order Act which permits gardaí to ask somebody to leave an area.

This provision is often invoked without reference to a reason for being asked to leave, which is required under the act. “The gardaí themselves say ‘we don’t need more laws’,” Mr Noble told the gathering. “‘We need resources’ (they say). They all talk about lack of training in interacting with people.”

The forum also heard from solicitor, David Joyce, about similar and even more pronounced issues that arise in the Travelling community’s interaction with the force.

In the grand scheme of policing, where armed gardaí must respond to and investigate gun murders and major drug-related crime, problems about stop-and-search might seem trivial. Equally, within some communities, where a small minority resort to violent or serious crime, the gardaí have a difficult and unenviable task.

Yet, abuse of human rights on any level is unacceptable. Just as important is the impact that these abuses have

on relations between gardaí and the communities they serve.

At one point on Wednesday, lawyer Alyson Kilpatrick, who served as a human rights advisor to the Northern Ireland Policing board, asked how many gardaí were in the room.

In an audience approaching around 100 people, a single hand went up. That belonged to Sergeant David McInerney, the highly regarded head of the force’s Racial and Intercultural Unit.

But still, one officer at a gathering to discuss a vital element that requires addressing when the future for policing is laid out? Change can’t come fast enough.