Policing In Northern Ireland Research Articles

Overcoming ‘Sheriff Syndrome’: Exploring Young Adults’ Experiences of Policing in Northern Ireland

This article delves into the pivotal role that police encounters play in shaping the experiences of 18- to 25-year-olds who come into contact with the criminal justice system. The study is anchored in an analysis of in-depth narrative interviews with young adults, predominantly young men, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their accounts unveil the latent risks of police approaches that may pivot on the ‘age and/or lack of maturity’ of young adults. Introducing the concept of ‘sheriff syndrome’, the research sheds light on the detrimental effects of entrenched, antecedent expectations regarding the behaviours, attitudes and (in)capacity for change of those over the age of 18 years. Participants’ accounts underscore the need for interactions that recognise and protect subjective elements of maturity, while cultivating opportunities for open, respectful and bidirectional communication between suspect populations of young adults and the police.

Post-Patten Policing in Northern Ireland: Outcomes, Challenges and Lessons

Post-Patten Policing in Northern Ireland: Outcomes, Challenges and Lessons

Through the looking glass: memory, myth and policing the past

ABSTRACT The legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict continues to weigh heavily on the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s institutional memory and contemporary policing practices. In this paper, we argue that the tension between competing interpretations of organisational memory and the need to ‘police’ the past has contributed to a ‘through the looking glass’ phenomenon as regards the policing past and efforts to ‘deal with’ the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. The article opens with an examination of the contested memory of policing in Northern Ireland. We then explore how, on the one hand, from a policing perspective, dealing with the past has been regarded as an opportunity to ‘celebrate’ aspects of the policing past but on the other, has reinforced a desire to ‘censure’ the less palatable aspects of police conduct during the conflict. Relatedly, we then interrogate how this desire to ‘secure the past’ has translated into the argument that existing and prospective mechanisms of truth recovery risk ‘re-writing’ the history of the conflict. Finally, the article considers how efforts at truth recovery have been acted upon and received by contemporary policing bodies. This part of the article lays bare both the practical challenges of ‘doing’ truth recovery within a policing framework and the need to ‘secure’ the memory of the policing past. The conclusion argues for the separation of policing and ‘the past’ and the removal of legacy work from policing bodies whose predecessor force was both a victim and perpetrator of that legacy of political violence.

LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR INTERNATIONAL AND CROSS-BORDER CO-OPERATION OF GARDA SÍOCHÁNA NA HÉIREANN — CASE STUDY

The main part of the article is the study on the legal character of the South Irish Police cross-border cooperation. The analysis includes the verifi cation of the normative basics that facilitate security assurance in the cross-border region. The aim of this article is also to present the evolution of the practical aspect of police cooperation between Garda Síochána na hÉireann and the Northern Ireland Police Service. First, it shows the legal bases for such cooperation and then the existing experience of the police and criminal justice system. The author also points out procedural consequences of working together to prevent and combat crime.

Ethno‐National Narratives of Human Rights: The Northern Ireland Policing Board

AbstractPolicing in Northern Ireland has undergone one of the world's most extensive human rights reform programmes. The challenge has been whether the human rights paradigm can serve as a mutual basis for the region's sparring ethno‐national communities to deliberate over long‐contested issues of policing, accountability and justice. This article focuses on the Northern Ireland Policing Board as an arena to examine the contemporary political attitudes and agendas that animate the Board's statutory duty to monitor policing on the basis of human rights. Marshalling qualitative data and drawing on legal anthropology, this article offers an account of the ‘social life’ of human rights and policing in the context of Northern Ireland's imperfect peace. It argues that, irrespective of legal standards, human rights oversight harbours deep sentiments and concerns, at the heart of which are communities’ own historical engagements with rights, competing legacies of the conflict and divergent understandings of contemporary policing.

Interviewing combatants: lessons from the Boston College Case

ABSTRACTBoston College’s Burns Library established a project in 2001 which archived over 200 interviews with two non-state armed groups in Northern Ireland in order to collect primary data on the Northern Ireland conflict before the death of some of the key armed actors. Interviews were confidential and embargoed till the death of the informants. Following the deaths of two of the interviewees, and a third interviewee revealing her participation to the press, the project director published a book and made a television documentary based on their interviews. Subsequently, the police in Northern Ireland requested access to the interviews under the United States-United Kingdom Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). Initial legal resistance by Boston College and protracted legal resistance by project director and researchers proved unsuccessful. Based on interviews handed over by Boston College to the authorities, one interviewee has been charged with soliciting a murder, and a second with two murders. A film based on videoed interviews with a third interviewee was released after her death. This article considers the implications of the Boston College project for academic research in times of conflict and the ethical, methodological and political implications for future research focused on non-state armed actors.

Can diversity promote trust? Neighbourhood context and trust in the police in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTThe association between trust in the police and neighbourhood context is well known. Police seem to enjoy more trust when community settings are perceived as orderly, cohesive and well-functioning, and trust seems to be lower when order and cohesion seem attenuated or under threat. Yet, little attention has been paid to the association between neighbourhood diversity and trust in the police. Allport's contact hypothesis suggests that because diversity increases intergroup contact and thus a sense of cohesion, it may promote trust in the police. We use data from a nationally representative survey conducted in 2014, combined with Census and other local-area data, to explore the association between ethno-religious diversity and trust in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. We find that trust is higher in more diverse areas, primarily because Catholics living in such areas report significantly higher levels of trust than their counterparts living in less diverse areas. We interpret these results in light of what policing means in contemporary Northern Ireland, almost two-decades after the country's landmark reform of policing began.

Historical dialogue and memory in policing change: The case of the police in Northern Ireland

This article explores the complex relationship between organisational change and historical dialogue in transitional societies. Using the policing reform process in Northern Ireland as an example, the article does three things: the first is to explore the ways in which policing changes were understood within the policing organisation and ‘community’ itself. The second is to make use of a processual approach, privileging the interactions of context, process and time within the analysis. Third, it considers this perspective through the relatively new lens of ‘historical dialogue’, understood here as a conversation and an oscillation between the past, present and future through reflections on individual and collective memories. Through this analysis, we consider how members’ understandings of a difficult past (and their roles in it) facilitated and/or impeded the organisations change process. Drawing on a range of interviews with previous and current members of the organisation, this article sheds new light on how institutions deal with and understand the past as they experience organisational change within a wider societal transition from conflict to nonviolence.

The Curious Case of the Patten Report

The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, chaired by Christopher Patten (the Patten Report) and entitled A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland and published in September 1999, has received a curiously uneven response over the past decade: Ellison describes its trajectory as ‘torturous’. Immediately upon its release it received a very warm reception from the government of the United Kingdom, which endorsed its approach and the thrust of its recommendations. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, welcomed the Report by saying that the Report ‘charts the way forward in the interests of all the people of Northern Ireland’. This support was soon eroded once legislation began to be drafted to implement its recommendations. The Bill brought before parliament in late 1999 to set up the framework for the implementation of the Patten Report proved to be a far cry from what the Report had recommended. The government’s initial rhetoric was not translated into action.

Crows on the Wire: intermediality in applied drama and conflict transformation – ‘humanising’ the police in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTCrows on the Wire (COTW) is an intermedial project deploying applied theatre, educational drama and digital performance [Dixon, S. (2007). Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] to explore the recent history of the peace process in Northern Ireland – specifically the ‘transition’ of the police force from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to the Police Services Northern Ireland in November 2001. This ‘rebranding’ was a key element of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) that nominally ended the civil conflict known as ‘The Troubles’. The COTW project, delivered by the Verbal Arts Centre based in Derry/Londonderry, expresses the anger and disaffection felt by some members of the RUC and the impact that this had on their sense of identity. It also addresses the perception that the RUC was sectarian and corrupt.

How the ‘suspect community’ became ‘critical engagers’: the (re)framing of the Irish republican narrative on policing in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTThis article is an empirical case study of how the Irish republican narrative on policing in Northern Ireland evolved from an absolutist position of rejection to one of post-conflict ‘critical engagement’. Drawing on previous research by McEvoy and by Mulcahy it evaluates the strategic dimensions to the (re)framing process that aided mobilisation throughout the course of the conflict and into the transition in Northern Ireland. Positing that the Irish republican policing narrative can be conceptualised into four distinct phases (passive rejection, ‘Ulsterisation’, disbandment and ‘critical engagement’), it critiques how the process of (re)framing enabled Irish republicans to adapt their policing narrative to mobilise in response to unfolding political developments in Northern Ireland. Although cognisant of certain dominant themes prevailing across multiple narrative phases, this article examines how the issue of policing was subject to changing narrative frames as the ‘end point’ the narrative sought to make changed from phase to phase. The changing ‘end points’, this article will argue, developed in tandem with changes in the relationship between Irish republicans and the Northern Ireland state.

PROTOCOL: Police Training Interventions to improve the democratic policing of protests

PROTOCOL: Police Training Interventions to improve the democratic policing of protests

Tracking change in Northern Ireland policing: temporal phases and key themes

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the change process in Northern Ireland policing through an analysis of temporally bracketed change phases and key change delivery themes ranging from 1996 to 2012.Design/methodology/approach– The research approach adopted is process based, longitudinal and multi-method, utilising “temporal bracketing” to determine phases of change and conjunctural reasoning to unravel the systematic factors interacting over time, within the case.Findings– The paper identifies and temporally brackets four phases of change: “Tipping point”; “Implementation, Symbolic Modification and Resistance”; “Power Assisted Steering”; and “A Return to Turbulence”, identifies four themes that emerge from RUC-PSNI experience: the role of adaptive leadership; pace and sequencing of change implementation; sufficient resourcing; and the impact of external agents acting as boundary spanners, and comments on the prominence of these themes through the phases. The paper goes on to reflect upon how these phases and themes inform our understanding of organisational change within policing organisations generally and within politically pressurised transition processes.Originality/value– The contribution of the paper lies in the documentation of an almost unique organisational case in an environmentally forced change process. In this it contains lessons for other organisations facing similar, if less extreme challenges and presents an example of intense change analysed longitudinally.

Shadow policing: the boundaries of community-based ‘policing’ in Northern Ireland

The intention of this article is to provide a structural and operational analysis of policing beyond the police in Northern Ireland. While the polity enjoys low levels of ‘officially’ recorded crime as part of its post-conflict status, little empirical analysis exists as to the epistemological roots of security production outside that of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The empirical evidence presented seeks to establish that beyond more prominent analyses related to paramilitary ‘policing’, the country is in fact replete with a substantial reservoir of legitimate civil society policing – the collective mass of which contributes to policing, community safety and quality of life issues. While such non-state policing at the level of locale was recognised by the Independent Commission for Policing, structured understandings have rarely permeated governmental or academic discourse beyond anecdotal contentions. Thus, the present argument provides an empirical assessment of the complex, non-state policing landscape beyond the formal state apparatus; examines definitions and structures of such community-based policing activities; and explores issues related to co-opting this non-state security ‘otherness’ into more formal relations with the state.

CAJ Policing Report (The Policing You Don't See)

Covert policing - the practices of communication interception, surveillance, the use of informants and undercover operations - was used extensively during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Covert policing is argued to have prolonged the conflict and did lasting and immense damage to the rule of law. After the signing of the peace agreement, the Northern Ireland police service undertook large-scale reforms which were designed to prevent the recurrence of such abuses. Yet the secret Security Service – implicated in past abuses – has not yet undertaken such reformation but has been put in charge of a highly important area of mainstream policing. MI5 maintains primacy in covert ‘national security’ policing and gives ‘strategic direction’ to the PSNI in this area. Despite its large role in policing and its lack of reform, governmental oversight of MI5 is limited and ineffective. Limited additional accountably measures were promised in the St Andrews Agreement but some of the most significant commitments, such as those to publish policy frameworks, have not been honoured. Instead, MI5 has been given control of one of the most sensitive areas of policing in Northern Ireland, operating undercover, without having been reformed, and without an accountability structure. This report develops a human rights based framework from international standards and the Patten Report and uses it to analyse past and present covert policing practice. This report reflects on evidence of the involvement of police informants in serious criminality, which led to recommendations to improve legality and accountability of covert policing. However, since primacy in ‘national security’ policing was given to MI5 five years ago (2007), the research finds that there is a growing “accountability gap” over a large part of policing. This report explains that the UK level oversight of MI5 is plainly inadequate and that the local mechanisms that hold the PSNI to account are evaded by the Security Service. It argues that this situation falls woefully short of international standards and has the capacity to undermine confidence in policing as a whole.

Book Review: Policing the Police in Northern Ireland: Politics, Crime and Security after the Belfast Agreement

Book Review: Policing the Police in Northern Ireland: Politics, Crime and Security after the Belfast Agreement

Hate Crime: Record or Perception?

Public policing in Northern Ireland has gone through a process of reform and governance change in reaction to the peace process and the requirement to shift from a police force, largely engaged in conflict-centred policing, to a policing service dedicated to civil policing and normalisation. During the past decade, Northern Ireland has witnessed a significant decline in recorded sectarian crime. This decline in ethnic conflict has been accompanied by a growth in support for the police, especially within the Catholic community. However, information pertaining to support for public policing is determined at national level and we know little about how residents of sites of previously high levels of political and sectarian conflict feel about policing reform and delivery. In this paper we show that the perception of sectarian crime is much greater than recorded sectarian crime. Moreover, the perception of sectarian crime is a significant predictor of negative attitudes regarding police performance. The paper offers a unique quantitative insight into perceptions of sectarian crime and posits a predicament that is not discussed or debated with regard to the delivery of community policing. The evidence presented offers a benchmark upon which such a debate could occur. We argue that knowledge of sectarian hate crime should not be centred at the national level, but at the more discrete scale of neighbourhood. Perceptions, whether linked to reality, signal or prejudice, can at times destabilise the peace-building process, yet are rarely attended to or discussed. Knowing the difference between recorded and perceived crime as either sectarian exaggeration or actuality would aid localised police-community interaction. Here we provide a statistical basis to stimulate such enquiry.

Policing the Narrow Ground: Lessons from the Transformation of Policing in Northern Ireland

Policing the Narrow Ground: Lessons from the Transformation of Policing in Northern Ireland

Responsible Participation, Community Engagement and Policing in Transitional Societies: Lessons from a Local Crime Survey in Northern Ireland

AbstractThe new structures of policing in Northern Ireland have been internationally lauded as a success, but the manner in which police‐community relations are unfolding in local settings is less clear. In this article we draw on a local crime survey conducted in a Republican area in Belfast to examine residents' views of policing and to highlight residents' concerns about police effectiveness in dealing with crime and disorder. Drawing on Habermas's concept of ‘responsible participation’, we also consider the role that community organisations can play in helping overcome local scepticism and developing positive forms of engagement with the police.

Leading the Police Service of Northern Ireland – ten years and beyond

PurposeThis paper sets out to review leadership development since the inception of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001, its developments over the past ten years, and to look at the opportunities and challenges for the future. It considers the new leadership strategy for policing in Northern Ireland.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores how leadership development has been considered before, during, and after the change process for policing in Northern Ireland. Through synthesis of available information, learning materials and documents, it identifies and reviews the key models, theories and approaches used for leadership and management development within the PSNI and the approach considered necessary for success in the future.FindingsThe PSNI has progressed significantly from policing the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland, where inward focus was more prevalent than the external partnership and collaborative approach that is needed today and in the future. The change from the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland required leadership to deliver the transformation required. A new leadership development strategy is vital if operational policing is to continue to enhance public confidence at a time of renewed terrorist threat.Practical implicationsPublic sector organisations are currently facing great change in order to ensure they are able to meet the challenges of globalisation, technology, demography and the world financial crisis. Leaders can learn from the experience of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in the transformational change process which took place over the past ten years and how it intends to meet the future challenges facing a smaller service with reduced funding.Originality/valueThis review comes ten years after the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It provides insights into the leadership development which supported the transformational change process within Northern Ireland.