Policing and human rights after the conflict
by Brice Dickson
Consistent with its stance on not making judgements about alleged human rights abuses perpetrated by police officers .in the past the Report makes no mention of whether any currently service police officers should be disqualified from appointment to the new Police Service because of their personal histories. Obviously there should be no currently serving officers who have a serious criminal or terrorist background: any officers convicted of such offences would have been dismissed from the force. But there may be currently serving officers who have been tried and acquitted of such offences, or accused but not tried. On the one hand it can be argued that these officers should not be treated any less generously than non police officers with such a background: if the latter can be eligible for the new Police Service then so should the former. The principle against double jeopardy should require no less. 11. On the other hand it can be said that the system for bringing serving police officers to justice for crimes they committed is so flawed and the conviction rate - in the cases where prosecutions or disciplinary charges are brought - so low, that like is not being compared with like. In support of this second position one can cite the facts that crimes alleged against the police have always been investigated by the police themselves, that case-hardening amongst judges is inclined to make them believe the word of a police officer over the word of an accuser of a police officer and that in police disciplinary hearings the standard of proof required is so high as to make it virtually impossible to uphold a complaint (quite apart from the fact that the persons adjudicating upon the complaint are again, fellow police officers).
There does not seem to be an easy answer to this conundrum. Much may depend on the extent to which careful records have been maintained of police officers' career histories. If those files still show that officer X was accused of offence Y at some point during the Troubles, but was never formally charged or convicted, then it may be possible, and even desirable, provided the offence in question was a serious one involving death or more than a minor injury for a specially convened panel to review the files and to consider whether there is anything there which demonstrates clearly,( even if not beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal standard of proof) that the officer may not have the requisite degree of commitment to human rights which Patten is now calling for. The position of officers whose actions have led to the Police Authority paying out sums of compensation to victims of those actions would be particularly vulnerable under this system: they may have escaped any disciplinary sanction before, or at the time of, the civil suit, because they were not proved to have breached the Code of Discipline, but they can still be said to have been responsible for the actions in question. Of course many compensatory sums are paid not because the Police Authority is admitting liability but because it wishes to settle to avoid further legal costs, the scandal of a court hearing or adverse publicity. In those cases the officer involved could usually not be shown to be legally responsible for what he or she did.
All in all, however, the chances of excluding from the new Police Service current officers who have in the past been aberrant, but not found guilty of, or liable for, any crime or breach of discipline, are slim. To be equitable, any screening process applied to such officers would also have to be applied to other potential recruits: the argument that they, unlike serving police officers, are not coming from an environment in which commitment to human rights should already have been a prerequisite for the job, holds no water because respect for human rights should be a sine qua non in every environment. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that all members of the new Police Service will be required not just to make an explicit declaration affirming their commitment to human rights but also to demonstrate at an interview, or in some form of psychometric test, how committed they are to be protection of human rights - including the human rights of criminals. The government, in its response to the Patten Report, stated categorically that 'there will be no question whatever of ex-terrorists joining the service' 12 but no mention was made of what should happen to those existing police officers who have a dubious past.
Another important aspect of the eligibility question is how to ensure that
nationalists are proportionally represented in the new Police Service. There
no longer seems to be any disagreement over the need for such proportional
representation, the present 7 per cent ratio for Catholics being universally
condemned as far too low. But there is considerable disagreement over how
to rectify the imbalance. The Patten Report made the controversial recommendation
that an equal number of Protestants and Catholics should be drawn from the
pool of qualified candidates for the service: |
