PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher finds himself at a crossroads – a place which he may or may not know to have a historically important place in the politics of the North.
Those of us within the nationalist community who took a gamble in 2007 and decided to go with the PSNI project faced down stern warnings – mostly but not all from dissident republican elements – that the new force/service would be incapable of forward movement, so heavily burdened was it with the reputation and personnel that had made the RUC incompatible with the idea of peace and normal policing.
The simple fact is that those who warned against taking a policing punt have pretty much been vindicated. Rather than move forward together towards a new and brighter future, the PSNI has opted to go down a different road. It has set itself up as an RUC personal protection squad, pouring a huge percentage of its limited resources into defending the indefensible. It has forged itself a reputation in a relatively short space of time not as a new broom sweeping away a grubby past, but as the Praetorian Guard of the old regime.
It’s not at all certain at this point if the PSNI is salvageable in the eyes of nationalists and republicans. Those who threw their lot in with the new dispensation are right to feel betrayed and more than a little embarrassed by their gullibility and so the job of reselling the PSNI to them is going to be a devilishly difficult one. But it’s a task that Mr Boutcher has to set about immediately and with an iron determination.
There are clearly elements within the PSNI whose loyalty to the past and to the RUC trumps their commitment to the future. If the hope 20 years ago was that the influence of RUC loyalists within the PSNI would lessen and eventually disappear through the attrition of time, that has been proved a disastrous miscalculation. The imperative of protecting the RUC has become embedded in the PSNI’s DNA, it has transferred across and down from older, more senior officers to all ages and all ranks to such a degree that there is no-one with an iota of influence within the PSNI shouting ‘Stop!’ There is no-one who recognises the PSNI’s devotion to laundering the RUC’s reputation for what it now is: An existential threat to the service’s future.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has found that the PSNI engaged in industrial-scale espionage against journalists here in a bid to cover up the RUC’s role in some of the most bloody and murky Troubles atrocities. Clawing back the massive reputational hit delivered by that finding is a sine qua non now of Mr Boutcher’s job description: He either reconciles the PSNI with those whose confidence it has betrayed, or he’s on the way back to a desk in Luton.
As he stands at this crossroads, Mr Boutcher needs to decide, and pronto, whether he’s going to continue down the road backwards in an armoured vehicle, or whether he’s heading towards the future in a liveried people carrier.
