PSNI looking bleak
Posted By: November 04, 2015
“The PSNI [ Police Service of Northern Ireland] has much to do to encourage Catholics to join but at present there’s not much in evidence. Abandoning 50/50 recruitment was a disastrous decision but the fact that the percentage of Catholics has peaked at 30 per cent and is falling demands radical action. Placing recruitment of Catholics as the last priority in a list does not indicate that senior PSNI officers grasp how serious a problem the imbalance is for a divided society.”
PSNI looking bleak
Brian Feeney. Irish News(Belfast). Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Amonth ago on September 30 PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton announced a new recruitment drive for the police.
He told the BBC the PSNI wanted more women, more people from west of the Bann [the more Catholic area]“and finally we want more Catholics”.
Wrong order. Wrong priorities. Wrong message. The single most important requirement the PSNI has for new recruits is more Catholics be they men or women. Hamilton also said they wanted more people ‘from across the social divide’. Presumably by that he meant more working-class recruits. He should have said more working-class Catholic recruits, but Catholic recruits from anywhere, any class is the first priority. It wasn’t in his message.
This government ended 50/50 recruiting as recommended by the Patten commission in 2000. The proconsul [ NI Secretary of State] at the time, Owen Paterson, was the culprit, a purblind right-winger who just didn’t “get it” as far as The North was concerned and to prove it, wore a stupid plastic bracelet to show his support for the Royal Irish Regiment. It was Paterson who re-established links with the UUP which ended in the disastrous UCUNF joint candidates in the 2010 election. His undistinguished period in office here began the consistent Unionist bias that this government has repeatedly shown and maintains.
Paterson’s decision to end 50/50 recruiting was based on Unionist sentiment, certainly not on the evidence that the policing problem here was near solution. To top it off, it coincided in 2011 with the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr, not an event likely to produce a lot more Catholic recruits. None of that penetrated Patterson’s right-wing carapace.
Thankfully he was washed out of the cabinet in the summer floods of 2014.
We have now reached the stage where both the percentage and raw numbers of Catholics in the PSNI have declined, is declining and will continue to decline. It reached a peak of 30 per cent though it’s unclear whether that includes civilian staff in the PSNI as well as front-line police. However, what is worse is that we do know only 17 per cent of those applying are Catholic. Quite simply that arithmetic means in the present recruitment drive the total percentage of Catholics in the PSNI must decline further since in the absence of affirmative action a minimum of something like 80 per cent selected will probably be Protestant.
Furthermore the number of senior Catholic officers is vanishingly small since a large proportion of those who had struggled to near the top took early retirement under the Patten terms. That means hardly anyone among the top ranks has any connection with the Catholic community here which now constitutes around 45 per cent of the population.
It’s a no-brainer that to be successful a police service must look like the population it serves. There’s no need to labour the point but experience in the US and Britain amply illustrates it. The police are civilians in uniform entrusted with special powers by society. Society owns the police but not many Catholics in the north believe they own the PSNI.
The PSNI hasn’t done much to help Catholics and nationalists feel they own it. Re-hiring former RUC Special Branch members as agency workers in numbers wasn’t a great idea. Using former RUC members to vet documents for inquests into deaths they might previously have investigated, ridiculous redactions, ‘losing’ vital documents, unconscionable delays in providing documentation to the coroner and much more have sapped confidence.
The handling of loyalist paramilitaries as compared to former republicans seems to mirror Unionist attitudes, namely that the UVF and UDA aren’t really much of a threat. Their leaders can participate in a press conference, their names are widely known and they run organizations that are illegal, but hey, so what? Contrast the obvious fishing exercise after the killing of Kevin McGuigan leading to a score of arrests signifying nothing.
The PSNI has much to do to encourage Catholics to join but at present there’s not much in evidence. Abandoning 50/50 recruitment was a disastrous decision but the fact that the percentage of Catholics has peaked at 30 per cent and is falling demands radical action. Placing recruitment of Catholics as the last priority in a list does not indicate that senior PSNI officers grasp how serious a problem the imbalance is for a divided society.
PSNI looking bleak
Brian Feeney. Irish News(Belfast). Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Amonth ago on September 30 PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton announced a new recruitment drive for the police.
He told the BBC the PSNI wanted more women, more people from west of the Bann [the more Catholic area]“and finally we want more Catholics”.
Wrong order. Wrong priorities. Wrong message. The single most important requirement the PSNI has for new recruits is more Catholics be they men or women. Hamilton also said they wanted more people ‘from across the social divide’. Presumably by that he meant more working-class recruits. He should have said more working-class Catholic recruits, but Catholic recruits from anywhere, any class is the first priority. It wasn’t in his message.
This government ended 50/50 recruiting as recommended by the Patten commission in 2000. The proconsul [ NI Secretary of State] at the time, Owen Paterson, was the culprit, a purblind right-winger who just didn’t “get it” as far as The North was concerned and to prove it, wore a stupid plastic bracelet to show his support for the Royal Irish Regiment. It was Paterson who re-established links with the UUP which ended in the disastrous UCUNF joint candidates in the 2010 election. His undistinguished period in office here began the consistent Unionist bias that this government has repeatedly shown and maintains.
Paterson’s decision to end 50/50 recruiting was based on Unionist sentiment, certainly not on the evidence that the policing problem here was near solution. To top it off, it coincided in 2011 with the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr, not an event likely to produce a lot more Catholic recruits. None of that penetrated Patterson’s right-wing carapace.
Thankfully he was washed out of the cabinet in the summer floods of 2014.
We have now reached the stage where both the percentage and raw numbers of Catholics in the PSNI have declined, is declining and will continue to decline. It reached a peak of 30 per cent though it’s unclear whether that includes civilian staff in the PSNI as well as front-line police. However, what is worse is that we do know only 17 per cent of those applying are Catholic. Quite simply that arithmetic means in the present recruitment drive the total percentage of Catholics in the PSNI must decline further since in the absence of affirmative action a minimum of something like 80 per cent selected will probably be Protestant.
Furthermore the number of senior Catholic officers is vanishingly small since a large proportion of those who had struggled to near the top took early retirement under the Patten terms. That means hardly anyone among the top ranks has any connection with the Catholic community here which now constitutes around 45 per cent of the population.
It’s a no-brainer that to be successful a police service must look like the population it serves. There’s no need to labour the point but experience in the US and Britain amply illustrates it. The police are civilians in uniform entrusted with special powers by society. Society owns the police but not many Catholics in the north believe they own the PSNI.
The PSNI hasn’t done much to help Catholics and nationalists feel they own it. Re-hiring former RUC Special Branch members as agency workers in numbers wasn’t a great idea. Using former RUC members to vet documents for inquests into deaths they might previously have investigated, ridiculous redactions, ‘losing’ vital documents, unconscionable delays in providing documentation to the coroner and much more have sapped confidence.
The handling of loyalist paramilitaries as compared to former republicans seems to mirror Unionist attitudes, namely that the UVF and UDA aren’t really much of a threat. Their leaders can participate in a press conference, their names are widely known and they run organizations that are illegal, but hey, so what? Contrast the obvious fishing exercise after the killing of Kevin McGuigan leading to a score of arrests signifying nothing.
The PSNI has much to do to encourage Catholics to join but at present there’s not much in evidence. Abandoning 50/50 recruitment was a disastrous decision but the fact that the percentage of Catholics has peaked at 30 per cent and is falling demands radical action. Placing recruitment of Catholics as the last priority in a list does not indicate that senior PSNI officers grasp how serious a problem the imbalance is for a divided society.
