Ed Koch, when he was mayor of New York, used to call to onlookers: “How’m I doing?” As far as I know, the Chief Constable of the PSNI is not giving to calling the same question, but as head of our new-ish police force…oops, police service, he might do well to have a hard look at the organization he leads.
The big change that was most evident after Chris Patten’s review of the RUC was that the spanking new PSNI began recruiting Catholics and Protestants on a 50:50 basis. This was vital, given that the RUC which it replaced had been some 90% or more Protestant/unionist. And of course it was the actions of the RUC which were responsible for one of the first deaths of the Troubles, Sammy Devenney, and which after October 5, 1968 in Derry, lost all credibility with the nationalist/Catholic population.
And so there was and is a great deal riding on the credibility of the PSNI. This would be a police service, not a police force, and recruitment, as I say, would be 50:50. That was in 2001.
At first many young Catholics joined the PSNI; one even lost his life at the hands of republican paramilitaries. The Catholic numbers rose until by 2011, some 30% of the PSNI was Catholic/nationalist. Then the quota was ended. Now only one in five of new recruits is a Catholic.
Why is that? Well, the DUP considered 50:50 recruitment “institutionalized sectarianism”. The PSNI’s own union, the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, was also opposed to Patten changes. When 50:50 recruitment was ended in 2011, there were few Catholics/nationalists in the higher ranks of the PSNI. Among many nationalists and republicans, rightly or wrongly, there is a growing suspicion that the old RUC ethos is alive and well beneath the PSNI colours.
More recently, we’ve had the headline case of the people killed in Loughinisland by loyalist gunmen vividly presented in the film No Stone Unturned. The documentary not only outlined events leading up to the killings but presented disturbing facts about the police investigation that followed. There was every indication that the investigation of the killings was at best slapdash and at worst pssible RUC collusion.
Now you might think this would have been an opportunity for the PSNI to show the public how changed policing has become since those bad old days. Amazingly, instead of a root and branch investigation of what happened back in 1994, the PSNI chose to arrest the two journalists involved in the No Stone Unturned film. On Thursday 29 November the two journalists, Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney, were made to report to the Musgrave police station. Members of the National Union of Journalists picketed the station, and the matter was well summed up by Niall Murphy, the solicitor for the two men:
“What should have happened after that [Ombudsman’s]report was a renewed police effort to prosecute the killers. But there was no criminal investigation into the killers. What is most disgraceful is that the only criminal investigation to arise from this renewed interest in the Loughinisland case is the arrest of two journalists.”
If the PSNI had set out to deliberately foster distrust among the Catholic/nationalist community, they couldn’t have done better – or worse. There now are real dangers that policing will slip back into the worst features of the old RUC.
But all is not lost. On Thursday 9th a bid by two retired police officers to quash the Ombudsman’s report into the killings was rejected by the judge involved. And the NUJ protest shows that journalists here are alive to the injustice being done to their two colleagues.
I’d say “Fingers crossed” for the future of the PSNI, except that real reform of policing here may call for more than crossed fingers.
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