PSNI and North’s Police Ombudsman urged to ‘work hard together’

The PSNI and the North's Police Ombudsman have been urged to develop effective working relationships after a police failure to disclose important information about the UDA murder of five Catholics at a bookmakers in Belfast in 1992 led to the postponement of an ombudsman's report into the killings.

The North's chief inspector of criminal justice, Jacqui Durkin, in a report published on Thursday acknowledged that this failure was due to "human error and not a deliberate act or omission".

Ms Durkin was commissioned to carry out her investigation after former police ombudsman Michael Maguire called for an independent review to be conducted into how “significant, sensitive information” about Troubles killings that he had requested was not supplied to him by the PSNI.

This related to the UDA murders of five Catholics at Sean Graham's bookmakers on the Ormeau Road in Belfast in 1992 and to the murder the following year, also by the UDA, of 17-year-old Catholic Damian Walsh at a coal depot near Twinbrook on the outskirts of west Belfast.

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It further related to the activities of loyalist paramilitaries in the northwest between 1988 and 1994.

Dr Maguire had been preparing to publish reports into the killings but they had to be postponed to allow further inquiries by the ombudsman based on the new information that has been elicited, but of which he was unaware.

Human error

The PSNI “deeply and sincerely” apologised at the time and said the non-disclosure was not deliberate.

Ms Durkin reviewed how the police disclose sensitive information to the Police Ombudsman’s office in Troubles-related cases.

She referred to how it was clear from the outset that both the former PSNI chief constable George Hamilton and Dr Maguire believed the failure to disclose the information "was as a result of human error and not a deliberate act or omission".

But she added that understandably this was “small comfort” to the bereaved and “evoked a strong reaction from the families and their legal and political representatives”.

"It also brought the PSNI, the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the OPONI [Office of Police Ombudsman] into a controversy over issues that they were neither designed nor resourced to manage," she said.

“The PSNI former chief constable fully accepted the criticality of the situation and had already commissioned an internal review and initiated a programme including investment in IT systems to deliver improvements.”

Ms Durkin called on the PSNI and the ombudsman’s office to “work hard together to strengthen trust and repair damage to public confidence”.

She said her “inspectors found substantial work was already under way within the PSNI to address” the problem issues, some of which related to IT systems, but “further work is needed by both organisations to establish more effective systems and better processes”.

PSNI deputy chief constable Mark Hamilton welcoming the report said, "From the outset, PSNI recognised the impact of the failure to disclose information to the ombudsman on both the families and the wider public's confidence in policing.

“This failure was not due to the actions of any individual but was an organisational and systems failure, and I unreservedly apologise again to the families for this. As soon as the issue came to police attention, we commissioned urgent work to address it, and over the course of the last year we have worked closely with OPONI and fully co-operated with the Criminal Justice Inspectorate to do so.”

Mark Thompson of Relatives for Justice said "the ombudsman must have direct and unfettered access to all documents held by the PSNI as a matter of routine when investigating such serious incidents".