Tom in Ireland: Policing WITH the community: Community Policing in the Heartland of Irish Republicanism

So right now I'm successfully procrastinating finishing my final independent study project and I figure I'd give everyone home a little taste of what I had been researching. This is basically the culmination of my whole trip and I got a chance to do real field work and interview some fascinating people.

My research had to do with the new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and how when they were reformed from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) the Patten Report said that the ultimate goal of the PSNI should be to "police WITH the community". Community policing has been something of recent interest to me back home, and there are few issues on the island of Ireland that have been as divisive over the years than policing. The old RUC was seen as the armed wing of Unionism and at certain points in its history was 98% Protestant when the community it was policing is only a little over 50% Protestant. The RUC also collaborated on many occasions with Loyalist paramilitaries to kill Republicans and sometimes innocent Catholics. On one occasion, Pat Finnucane, a human rights lawyer who defended many accused IRA men and women was murdered by the UDA at his dinner table in front of his wife and children. Pat NEVER was a member of the IRA, but he was a human rights lawyer who fought against the emergency legislation and abuse used against political prisoners. Much evidence suggests that those UDA men were given information about Pat by the RUC after they were held for questioning and the RUC suggested to them he may be a IRA volunteer. This is only one instance where collusion is so very evident in Northern Ireland and no action has been taken to hold power accountable. So the long and short, Police, in any uniform, under any name, represent oppression and a political police force, rather than a police service. I set out to gather the perceptions of community workers in West Belfast (known for it's heavy Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community) of the PSNI, and perceptions of the community held by the PSNI. My research was informative and inspiring and I met many people from the PSNI and community groups who want nothing more than to bring peace and some semblance of "normality" to their troubled country.

One community activist told me that the way he sees it, reforming policing in NI from the RUC to the PSNI is like reforming the KKK. Now of course that seems like an outlandish statement, and even upon research of policing in NI it is still far more radical of a viewpoint than I would take, but that particular activist's experience with policing has NEVER been a positive one. I first needed to realize he doesn't see police the way I see them. He didn't have people like Officer Bowen and Officer Barry teaching him about "the 8 ways to say no" and "stranger danger", he simply doesn't see the police as a service, but as a force. He is part of a group called Eirigi ("rise up" in Irish) that is a non-violent political campaign group against the peace process in NI. Non-violent and against the peace process, how can that be? I'd describe it as they're not against the peace part, but rather they are against the particular process towards peace and the way decisions continue to be made at an elite level. Eirigi is compromised of hard line Socialist Republicans who have walked away from Sinn Fein and would see people like Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams as sell outs, doing nothing more than administering British Rule where it doesn't belong. The group started out of a need to organize Republicans who no longer identified with Sinn Fein, but did not wish to join the Continuity IRA or Real IRA (the CIRA and RIRA are splinter groups of the Provisional IRA who fought during the troubles and have not decommissioned or stopped fighting and the RIRA has become increasingly active in a pointless bombing campaign) who insist on dragging everyone back to needless violence. Eirigi is an interesting group, and I anticipate them having a big impact on the island (they are actually based out of Dublin and are an all Ireland Party/campaign) in the coming years. When I asked this representative, if Eirigi won the revolution they seek, and tomorrow we woke up in Eirigi's Socialist Republic, what would policing look like? He replied that they wish to make the debate about community policing wider than simply about policing, but about our societal frameworks as whole. I agreed with him whole heartedly. I don't think we can simply debate that we need to make policing more effective at making people safe in their community when there are societal problems all around us that are causing crime to appear. When things like education and social programing are consistently put on a back burner, and things like anti social behavior, drugs, domestic violence, and other crime are everywhere, policing is not the issue to be concerned with. If we bring about "normality" and "equality" in policing and "normality" and "equality" in Northern Ireland, within the Capitalist framework, we have brought about the normalization of marginalization and an equal opportunity to be poor and neglected. In my opinion the RUC did need to be reformed, and there have been small successes, but society as a whole needs to change a lot more.

Another person I met with was a woman who represented the Falls Community Council (The Falls refers to Falls Road, the main road in west Belfast, it is usually identified with its working class Catholic population)and she also is representative of the West Belfast Community Safety Forum. The Falls Council advises people when they have a certain issue and they simply don't know which statutory body to go to for help. In this way they hold these bodies (including the PSNI) accountable and track complaints made to them about non response by these bodies to use statistical data to display neglect of this extremely marginalized community. The Council is somewhat of an umbrella organization and her specialty is the West Belfast Community Safety Forum. The WBCSF started out of an "absence of police". In 2006 a man from the Falls area was murdered in the middle of the street, with multiple witnesses. Days after the murder, the police had not taken witness statements, had not sealed of the crime scene (the street had footprints in blood up and down the sidewalks because it was never forensically analyzed or cleaned up), and although everyone knew who was guilty, no one had been arrested or questioned. This was the reality in which the people of West Belfast were living in. This was in 2006! The Patten Report that held the reforms of the police force came out in 1999 and the so called, reformed PSNI came about in 2001! The WBCSF began joining community groups from around West Belfast to hold these people to account and have so far done a good job. I asked her if the recent devolution of Policing and Justice powers (April 10) from Westminster in England to David Ford, who sits locally in the Northern Ireland Assembly will make any difference on a grass roots level. Her response made me laugh a little and inspired me an incredible amount. She said "Well it better. Because all it takes is for me to get a whole bus load of angry people showing up at David Ford's office, saying hey, we wanna talk to you for a minute."

I also talked to representatives from Suffolk Lenadoon Interface Group. SLIG is a group made up of community workers from the Protestant Suffolk neighborhood and the Catholic Lenadoon neighborhood. Suffolk is just about the only Protestant neighborhood in West Belfast (in terms of where the policing districts are drawn up) and the dialogue between these two communities is encouraging. One issue we talked about was parades. I had talked in an earlier post about the Orange Order and their parades celebrating the defeat of Catholic King James by Protestant King William. During marching season this area has the potential to be the epicenter of rioting and sectarianism. But it isn't. Why? Dialogue and cooperation, that's why. The Protestants still have their march and their bonfire rages within a 360 degree view of the Catholic neighborhoods Suffolk is surrounded by, and while sectarian violence is not absent, it is much lower than other areas. When I had spoken to the PSNI earlier in my research they held this area up as a success story and even downplayed their own role in keeping it safe, referring to how the community polices it themselves. This interface area has come a long way considering it is where the first IRA cease fire in the 70's broke down, and used to be a breeding ground for paramilitaries on both sides of the conflict.

I also interviewed a representative of Community Restorative Justice Ireland, a community organization that solves crime in local communities using restorative methods rather than punitive methods. CRJ is based in Brehon Law, laws written during Ireland's "golden age" before colonialism. It operates in Republican areas, and they do have a healthy working relationship with the PSNI, and have to report any cases they get when there is an element of real criminality. Their founders were academics, activists, and former IRA volunteers, who knew the local community and identified with the issues facing it much better than the police. Their motto is from Brehon Law and it reads, "ceart dom, ceart duit" which means, what is right for me, is right for you, but it is loosely translated to be the golden rule.

And of course the best for last, the PSNI. After all my leftist ranting I guess I owe the PSNI a little respect for certain successes, because they have had successes. I met many officers, and some of them did little to remove my prejudice of them being little more than sectarian bigots in uniform. However, one officer who was the highest ranking one I spoke with was incredibly insightful and encouraging. I asked him if it is hard to work with a community so heavily associated with the IRA, who throughout the armed conflict targeted officers of the RUC (which he is a former member of) as "legitimate targets". He first told me some back story of his career and how he used to work in Newry, a town close to the border. I had read a book written by an IRA volunteer who was arrested for the mortar attack on this certain station, and I could see where he was going with this. 9 officers were killed, and this officer described how if he still worked their he would find it extremely hard to work with former members of the IRA while engaging with the community, whom he would have known as the ones responsible for his co-workers and friends being killed. However working in Belfast has given him a chance to distance himself with that and he told me just that morning he had a man in his office from the Falls area who had been convicted of killing two British Military soldiers. He consults with this man on a regular basis and although he will never agree with what he has done, he must RESPECT this man. He also must RESPECT the community he polices. Because without RESPECT, we're right back in 1966 with a two tiered police force and we might as well start killing each other again. I may be extremely critical of the PSNI as a body, but certain officers such as this guy, they're all right in my book.

I couldn't help but think back to my middle school days when he started telling this story and recall Officer Bowen, our DARE officer. It seems funny that in the middle of a project dealing with an extremely violent and bloody sectarian conflict I would realize that all I really needed to know about successfully reforming the PSNI, I learned from my DARE officer. I remember he used to come in everyday to class and ask "What's the word?" and the class would respond, "RESPECT". I guess that is what successful community policing is really all about, respect.

A music video from Ciaran Murphy "They'll Awlays be the RUC to me"
not exactly a statement I agree with, but it's worth a look