AS the PSNI turns 20, it would be churlish not to acknowledge the advances that have been made over two decades. If truth be told, given the record of the late and unlamented RUC, it would have been a feat of unimaginable incompetence for the service not to have made any advances, but progress is progress and must always be pocketed.
As our columnist Andrée Murphy pointed out on BBC Ulster’s Talkback on Tuesday, the PSNI has been doing excellent work in the field of domestic abuse and, while resource issues continue to be a problem, as they are with police services all over Ireland and Britain, the service has made significant strides in normalising and modernising. That said, of the last intake of 193 officers in 2020, 75 per cent were from a Protestant background and 24 per cent were from a Catholic background. This week a familiar line-up of former police officers and commentators were again telling us that the numbers remain skewed because of a threat from republican micro-groups, with zero acknowledgment that the biggest barrier to more Catholics in the PSNI is the service’s failure to sweep away the most signficant issues – those put in place by the PSNI themselves.
The insistence on retaining sidearms and automatic weapons on routine duties is one such difficulty faced by young Catholics: if it might be hard for a rookie nationalist policeman or woman to enter a nationalist area wearing a police uniform, how much harder is it for them when they’re asked to do so carrying guns on their hip and – at times – military-style assault weapons in their arms. Throw in the continued refusal to get rid of plastic bullets – an issue that still resonates deeply and has left many physical and mental scars – and the pretence that forces outside the PSNI’s control are the main driver of the continued religious imbalance can be seen for the fiction that it is.
But it is in the field of legacy that the PSNI has struggled the most in its attempts to win more widespread community buy-in. Its foot-dragging on disclosure, its determination to burnish the fatally tarnished reputation of the RUC (often led by former RUC officers) is leading to increasingly widespread disillusion in the Catholic and nationalist community.
The hugely disappointing news last week that there’s to be another delay in the publication of a report into a notorious series of loyalist murders was not an anomaly but entirely standard. The Police Ombudsman has laid the blame for this latest delay firmly at the door of the PSNI and the strong suspicion remains that the delay has little to do with legal process and more to do with the protection of RUC figures who may have involved in collusion with loyalist murder gangs.
The hysterical reaction to recently-suggested PSNI reforms in South Armagh shows that the required reform will not come easily. But Chief Constable Simon Byrne should understand that police reform is simply not a concept that has an alternative.
