The Official Police Voice

Abstract

The task of this chapter is to trace how and why human rights law has come to be such an integral and sustained feature of the PSNI’s official narrative. The reason, this chapter argues, lies in the apparent power of human rights discourse to cool down, even if not quite neutralize, political tensions, debates and controversies that still animate ‘high-level policing’ (Brodeur, 1983) in the country. To frame this chapter’s analysis of the PSNI’s official vernacular of human rights, a ‘dialogic’ model of legitimacy is drawn upon to better account for the conditional nature of power and legitimation. Doing so enables us to better identify and account for the dynamic struggles in which rights-based claims are deployed as part of efforts to frame, or even resolve, contemporary political and public debates. By closely examining chief officers’ forewords and speeches, as well as their public responses to questions at the Policing Board’s public session, three central properties are identified that define this official vernacular. These are: human rights as legality; as an ethics of power; and as accountability. Each of these major strands of the police voice, it is argued, contribute to a purported vision of the PSNI as worthy of endorsement by elite audiences.