The Police (Northern Ireland) Bill becomes law this month. After a year long commission looking at the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) under Tory Chris Patten, the gutting of his 175 recommendations and a tug-of-war in the House of Lords over various clauses, we are still left with a Unionist dominated police and a command structure and operational procedures that are unaccountable and intrinsically discriminatory against anti-unionists.

The history of the Bill, first published in March this year, is one of concession after concession by the British government to the reactionary pleadings of the Unionists. Most of the publicity has been focused on the fight over the name of the “new” force and the fate of flags and symbols.

The Unionists were prepared to accept only one type of change: token. Sinn Fen and the SDLP, on the other hand, insisted upon a break with all references to the British state and crown in line with Patten’s recommendations.

Peter Mandelson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, has reserved the final decision on these issues to himself, in consultation with the new policing board, which itself is likely to have an in-built Unionist bias.
But this hullabaloo masked the real Unionist objective in the guerrilla war over the RUC’s fate: the composition, command structure and operational control over the police force.

It is central to republicanism’s perspective of reform of the sectarian statelet that the RUC be completely transformed. The problem is real enough. The RUC has 12,500 officers, less than a thousand of them catholic. This is three times the "normal" size for a police force given the population. The bulk of this brutal apparatus exists for the sole purpose of repressing the resistance and protests of the anti-unionists.

It has the worst human rights record of any police force within the EU, and was castigated last year by the UN for systematic intimidation of the lawyers of anti-unionist detainees. It colluded with Loyalist death squads in the murder of lawyers Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson for their role in defending republicans.

Every day this heavily armed loyalist force harasses Catholic youth on the estates, hurling racist abuse at catholic residents. Meanwhile, the RUC investigates complaints against itself and unsurprisingly finds itself blameless.

Of over 2,500 complaints in 1996, only 10 led to any disciplinary proceed-ings and only one resulted in a guilty verdict. In April 1998, an internal RUC report revealed that, of the 5 per cent of catholics in the RUC one-third complained of discrimination in promotion and operational duties as well as regular sectarian abuse.

When they were revolutionary nationalists Sinn Fein used to insist that the RUC was completely unacceptable to anti-unionists and called for its disbandment. But now they argue that it can be made accountable to the catholic community it has routinely repressed.

During the Patten commission they called for a 40 per cent cut in its size, its disarming in routine operations, immediate reform of the command structure/control over policing strategy and some kind of community policing system, which would allow catholic officers to patrol catholic estates.

The new law rejects the underlying basis of Patten report which was not just about reforms to the RUC but about changing the nature of policing and making it more accountable to the community it supposedly serves. The new law throws that idea out.

The police board has watered down powers of scrutiny over the chief constable. The Unionists insisted on a general clause which states: "if it appears" to the chief constable that any report "would, or would be likely to, prejudice the prevention or detection of crime or apprehension or prosecution of offenders" s/he may refer it to the secretary of state who may overrule the board. The law also allows the secretary of state to quash an independent inquiry initiated by the board on the same grounds.

It outlines a cut in the force’s size (around 4,500 loyalists will get big pay-offs to leave over the next 10 years). Recruitment will be on a 50:50 basis in an attempt to overcome catholic alienation. But even here this policy will lapse in three years unless renewed by the British.

Other reforms have been neutered. The Patten report recommended that the actual process of recruitment should be handed to an outside agency while the new law puts the chief constable in control of the agency. As a result of Unionist pressure only new officers will be asked to swear an oath upholding human rights and to perform their duties with "fairness" and "impartiality".Existing officers have no such obligations!

The new “Police Service of Northern Ireland” is just the RUC with a minor makeover. Mitchell McLaughlin of Sinn Fein has said: "I think Sinn Fein will be finding it impossible to recommend that nationalists should join this police service or give any allegiance or authority to it."

The SDLP have refused to date to commit to taking part in a new 19-member Police Board.

The new RUC will remain as the old; accountable only to British state in the pursuit of repression against those who fight for a united Ireland and against sectarian discrimination. In the first place it will target those on the republican side who reject the Good Friday Agreement.

Sinn Fein must not be allowed to be sucked in to taking responsibility for this force within the anti-unionist community. The new RUC must be disbanded, the anti-unionist community dissuaded from joining up, persuaded to organise their own defence against the state, the Loyalist gangs and, indeed, any anti-social elements within their own community.

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