'Reflecting all shades of opinion'
Public Attitudinal Surveys and the Construction of Police Legitimacy
in Northern Ireland
The discussion is divided into three parts. The first part considers the importance of 'consent' to the RUC's institutional discourse and the state's language of legitimation in Northern Ireland. The second part will assess the role of public attitudinal surveys in manufacturing consent for the RUC and highlight a number of methodological flaws that typify such surveys. The third part will draw upon primary empirical data to suggest that support for the RUC may be more qualified than previously assumed, particularly from within the nationalist/Catholic community.
Consent and Legitimacy
The notion of public acceptability forms a central element in the RUC's institutional discourse, drawing as it does upon a particular reading of British (as opposed to colonial) police history, whereby the acceptability, and hence the legitimacy of the police hinges upon consent and an assumed relationship between the police and the public. It is not the intention here to debate whether consent for policing ever existed - particularly among the lower classes - suffice to note that considered historically it becomes problematic (Brogden 1982; Pearson 1983; Storch 1975, 1976). More recently, the consensual basis of British policing has been challenged by the serious deterioration in relations between the police and black youth, culminating in some of the most violent and disruptive public order confrontations ever seen in Britain (Reiner 1992; Jefferson 1990). Furthermore, the economic and social dislocation of the Thatcher years has spawned a generation of alienated, marginalised and disaffected white lower-class youth, an 'underclass' to borrow Wilson's egregious term, who have been increasingly drawn into hostile and confrontational encounters with the forces of law and order.
Nonetheless, while the actuality of consent may be disputed, its importance as a crucial legitimatory discourse for the British police is not. Consent was (and remains) central in delineating the relationship of the police to civil society, reflected in the unique status of the office of Constable under English common law. As Brogden remarks:
This reference to public consent to policing is not contrived. It is not an artificial construct, an ideological conspiracy, deliberately manufactured as a rationalisation, or a concealment for maleficent practices, suddenly revealed. Instead it represents a concrete ideology, a major and substantive view of the relation between civil society and the police as affirmed by senior officers, and repetitively reiterated in a myriad of public and private statements. (1982: 170)
Unlike the situation in Britain, the issue of consent for the police role and function in Northern Ireland (and Ireland under British colonial rule) has been a historically peripheral issue. From the earliest days of the Northern state, the institutional relationship between the RUC and the Unionist government - direct political subordination and direction - meant that while public support for the force may have been desirable, it was in fact, immaterial(2). Political exigencies, in particular the control of political dissent, were prioritised over that of courting the support of the nationalist/Catholic community and their relationship to the new Northern state (Ruane and Todd 1996; Palmer 1988).
As Tomlinson notes, one of the key concerns of the British administration
reacting to the civil disturbances that erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969,
was to persuade the Unionist government to adopt 'British standards of policing'
(1980:180). Lord Hunt, whose Report of Advisory Committee on Police in Northern
Ireland (1969) laid the foundations for the modern RUC, recommended a number
of changes to the force, many of which mirrored in spirit if not entirely
in substance the Police Act 1964 for England and Wales. Hunt proposed that
the RUC be disarmed, relieved of its paramilitary duties, and 'assume the
character and sole function of a civil police force'. For the first time
the force was to be taken out of direct political control and located within
a tripartite structure of accountability between the Governor of Northern
Ireland, and a newly established Police Authority. Additional proposals
concerned the establishment of a Community Relations branch, refinements
to the rank structure which was be modelled on the British system, and a
recommendation that the colour of the uniform be changed from 'Irish Green'
to 'British Blue' (Walker 1990) (3). |
