Patterns of Policing and Policing Patten
| Date | 01 September 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00161 |
| Author | Mike Tomlinson,Paddy Hillyard |
| Published date | 01 September 2000 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2000
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 394–415
Patterns of Policing and Policing Patten
Paddy Hillyard* and Mike Tomlinson**
In September 1999 the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern
Ireland, chaired by Chris Patten, published its recommendations. This
article examines the political context of policing reform, the contents of
the report and the rejection of its core ideas in the Police (Northern
Ireland) Bill published in May 2000. The central argument of the paper is
that the Commission’s radical model of policing – a network of
regulating mechanisms in which policing becomes everyone’s business –
failed, because it gave insufficient attention, like much modern writing on
policing, to the role of the state and the vested interests within policing.
The overall outcome is that the Patten Commission has been effectively
policed and Northern Ireland will be left with a traditional, largely
undemocratic and unaccountable model of policing with most of the
control resting with the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF POLICE REFORM
Dealing with rebellion and political disorder was the primary function of
policing in Ireland throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Irish police forces, set up well ahead of those in Britain, were typically large,
centralized, militarized, and backed up by an impressive battery of coercive
law, and they served as a model for policing throughout the British empire.
1
The partition of Ireland ensured that this form of policing remained in
Northern Ireland and the past decades of conflict have seen it developed in
extensive and extraordinary ways.
394
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1 P. Hillyard, ‘Policing Divided Societies: Trends and Prospects in Northern Ireland
and Britain’ in Policing Futures: The Police, Law Enforcement and the Twenty-First
Century, eds. P. Francis, P. Davies, and V. Jupp (1997).
* School of Social and Community Sciences, University of Ulster,
Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim BT37 0QB, Northern Ireland
** School of Sociology and Social Policy, Queen’s University, Belfast BT7
1NN, Northern Ireland
Police reform was a major issue at the start of the current conflict in the
late sixties and it is so now, at the moment of its hoped for resolution thirty
years on. In such circumstances, the problem of police reform is necessarily
bound up with defence of the state, the conflict over whether Northern
Ireland should be ‘Irish’ or ‘British’, and the substantial vested interests
which the security industry now represents. As the struggle over the legiti-
macy of policing has proceeded since 1969, the reform agenda has involved
issues of professionalization, demilitarization, the layering of paramilitary
and civilian functions,
2
accountability and inquiry, complaints procedures,
and public order technologies. In addition, there have been protracted legal
battles over police powers and ‘emergency’ legislation, involving both
domestic and international law, frequent visits to the European Court of
Human Rights and, in recent years, regular visits to Northern Ireland by
United Nations officials.
It is now more than two years since Good Friday 1998 when the Belfast
Agreement
3
emerged from a political process begun years previously. This
‘peace process’ has involved the political parties within Northern Ireland
(NI), and the Irish and British governments, but also the United States
administration. It has subsequently involved military, legal, academic,
business, and political figures from Europe, Canada, South Africa, and
elsewhere. Arguments about policing – past, present, and future – have at
times been central to the international politics surrounding the NI conflict,
but the significance of the Agreement is that it not only produced an
accommodation on the constitutional question and the future form of
government, but that it named (if not resolved) all the areas of contention
between the parties, including human rights, militarization, inequality,
prisoners, the legal system, and of course policing.
Clinton’s change in United States policy towards the inclusion of Irish
republicanism in any settlement of the conflict was one decisive moment in
the peace process over the past decade, as was the IRA’s ceasefire in 1994.
Under John Major’s premiership, the British government’s initial response
was to resist the Clinton route by making the terms of Sinn Fe´in’s inclusion
in negotiations dependent, not just on an IRA ceasefire but on the surrender
of at least some weapons – the famous ‘Washington 3’ condition on
decommissioning announced by Sir Patrick Mayhew in 1995.
4
This condition has dogged the peace process ever since. Its origins are
obscure but reflected the deeply conservative and unionist instincts of
395
2 See M. Brogden, Two-tier policing – a middle way for Northern Ireland (1998)
3 Belfast Agreement, Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Talks (1998).
4 See M. Tomlinson, ‘Walking Backwards into the Sunset: British Policy and the
Insecurity of Northern Ireland’ in Rethinking Northern Ireland, ed. D. Miller (1998)
118.
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2000
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