Progress or Placebo? The Patten Report and the Future of Policing in Northern Ireland
by Maggie Beirne
From: Policing & Society Vol.11, No.2, 2001. Published by Harwood Academic Publishers, a member of Taylor & Francis Ltd.
(O)n 6 June, and an Oversight Commissioner was appointedi nine months after Patten had called for the appointment to be made "as soon as possible".
This problem of delay is twofold. On the one hand, many argued that the changes Patten called for were long needed, and that any further delay was therefore unacceptable. However, even more importantly, it is difficult to avoid the sense that change is taking place but very much behind the scenes, and at a pace and in a way that those currently responsible for policing want it to occur. Political will is always a determining factor in preventing or facilitating successful change, and whereas the necessary political will for change did initially appear to exist within government, the signs since the report's publication have been ominous.
To take several examples, it is clear that the appointment of an Oversight Commissioner was a very important Patten recommendation. By appointing an eminent independent person (from a country other than the UK or Ireland), with responsibility for supervising the implementation of Patten's recommendations, one could insulate (somewhat, at least) the policing debate from local political negotiations and wrangles. The appointment of an external scrutineer also was intended to imbue the process of policing change with integrity and secure public confidence. The intention was that the Oversight Commissioner, with a small support team of staff, would review progress and act as "a useful validator of the implementation process...The review process would provide an important impetus to the process of transformation" (Patten 1999: 106). The real value of a high-calibre person playing a scrutinising role is that they can inform and influence the debate from its earliest stages. Although government concurred with the proposal to appoint an Oversight Commissioner, the (unexplained) tardiness in appointing the incumbent meant that the Commissioner was excluded from scrutinising the draft legislation, played no part in the detailed Implementation Plan prepared by the Northern Ireland Office and the policing establishment, and has still to appoint staff, take on a public profile and produce his first report. Moreover, there was no wide trawling for suitable candidates, and the search was conducted largely in private and essentially by those in the Northern Ireland Office currently responsible for policing. Given this totally opaque nominating process, the inordinate delay in appointment, and with the incumbent being restricted to monitoring implementation "of those changes agreed by the government" (NIO Press Release, 19 January 2000), one is left wondering how innovative or influential this appointment can actually be?
The delay in appointing an external Oversight Commissioner has left government open to the (not easily refuted) charge that the nature and pace of change has been deliberately left in the hands of those who have so mis-managed policing in the past. A study of the draft legislation, for example, seems to confirm the view that government is unwilling to move effectively to put Patten's agenda into practical effect.
Of course, to judge by official government statements, one would have thought that government was fulfilling Patten in its first draft legislative text in May. The same claim - to be fulfilling Patten - was still being asserted in July (when, by its own admission, government had already made 52 substantive changes to bring the initial draft in line with Patten). At the time of writing, further amendments have again been promised prior to the House of Lords debate.
But if the government does genuinely want to implement Patten, as it says
it does, one must wonder why is it still resistant to a whole range of important
safeguards that Patten called for? Why is it impossible to get government
agreement to include explicit reference in the legislation to a broad range
of international human rights norms and standards? What reason can there
be for the government denying any role to the NI Human Rights Commission
in advising on the police use of plastic bullets? Why are effective inquiry
powers for the Policing Board consistently opposed? Why is the Secretary
of State so adamant that the Police Ombudsperson cannot have the powers
to investigate police policies and practices that Patten called for? Why
was the appointment of the Oversight Commissioner so long delayed, and why
is his term of office so curtailed in the legislation? |
