The language of policing and the struggle for legitimacy in Northern Ireland
by Aogán Mulcahy and Graham Ellison
From: Policing and Society Vol.11, No.2, 2001. Published by Harwood Academic Publishers, a member of Taylor & Francis Ltd.
The language of policing in Northern Ireland
Our purpose here is to outline the ways that this language of policing both reflects and predicates the struggle over police legitimacy and, by extension, the legitimacy of the state. Drawing largely on ethnographic interviews with serving and retired RUC officers conducted between 1992-97, we explore how this language of policing is intimately linked in with the broader issue of legitimising the state and police alike (for further methodological details, see Ellison 1997 and Mulcahy 1998). We seek to demonstrate how the prescription of specific vocabularies - and the associated proscription of others - is deployed to configure meaning and shape public understandings of these issues. Our efforts are not directed towards making prosaic - and ultimately unhelpful - distinctions between rhetoric and reality, but with charting the relationship between representational and material practices. In this sense, language functions to close down, as much as to open up, communicative possibilities.
Manifest consent
In this section, and developing our earlier work (Ellison 2000, Mulcahy 2000), we consider how the issue of consent has been mobilised as a key component in securing police legitimacy in Northern Ireland. Public attitudinal surveys and anecdotal evidence of 'behind closed doors support' are important features of this. They are also closely linked with broader arguments that intimidation (from republicans in particular) and timidity (among nationalists and the 'silent majority' generally) account for much of what appears to be hostility towards the RUC.
Public attitudinal surveys and the construction of legitimacy
Official discourse is clearly concerned with the censure of opponents and critics, but it is devotes considerable attention to the celebration of its core principles. One of the clearest manifestations of this celebration is the RUC reliance upon public attitudinal surveys to support its claim that it polices with the consent of nationalists. Public attitudinal surveys are used as an important mechanism for 'celebrating' police legitimacy by depicting 'the RUC as a force that operates with a high level of cross-community support for its role, and to emphasise its 'ordinariness' in the face of - until recently - a protracted internal war' (Ellison 2000: 89). Since such surveys were first conducted in the 1980s, their findings have served as an important means of refuting criticism and articulating claims of support. On the basis of such surveys, one Northern Ireland Office publication stated that 'Although it is required to operate in difficult circumstances, the RUC is very well regarded by most of the people in the province' (NIO 1989:36). These findings are also a source of pride to RUC officers themselves, who use them to highlight 'the fact that there's a high level of satisfaction with the force [that] is above that of other forces on the mainland' (RUC Superintendent).
The significance of public attitudinal surveys should not be underestimated.
In difficult and contentious circumstances, they provide a hook upon which
to hang claims of legitimacy. The comparison with British survey findings
is significant in two respects. First, it reinforces the strategy of normalisation
insofar as the RUC can be depicted as just another 'British' force, performing
similar kinds of duties and functions. Second, the fact that the RUC's satisfaction
ratings - even given the difficult circumstances of policing in Northern
Ireland - apparently compare favourably with those for British forces lends
credence to the view so frequently expressed by senior officers that the
RUC is 'one of the best police forces in the world'. Thus, not only is the
RUC a normal police force, but its effectiveness surpasses that of other
forces operating in liberal democracies. Such claims might be casually made,
but the manner in which they shape official policy is evident in the evocative
titles of various official publications: Working Together to Police Northern
Ireland (1988), People, Policing, Progress (1991), 'Everyone's Police' (1996),
Listening to the Community, Working with the RUC (1997), and Reflecting
All Shades of Opinion (1998). |
