A major £100 million overhaul of police serious crime operations means that the special branch element of the PSNI cannot be a "force within a force", the vice chairman of the Policing Board Mr Denis Bradley has asserted.
And SDLP Policing Board member Mr Alex Attwood insisted that Sinn Féin no longer could have any genuine excuses for refusing to support the PSNI.
Mr Bradley and Mr Attwood made their comments after details of the PSNI's new Crime Operations Department were announced following a private meeting of the Policing Board in Belfast yesterday.
Assistant Chief Constable Sam Kinkaid has taken charge of the new department, which will have 1,280 officers and will deal with terrorist, serious and organised crime.
It has an annual budget of £100 million, which is one seventh of the PSNI's overall £700 million budget.
Seven different departments come under the umbrella of the Crime Operations Department including C3, the new name for the old RUC Special Branch. It will have 400 officers, the same number as in C2, which deals with serious crime. C1, which deals with organised crime, will have 150 officers.
The remaining officers will be shared between branches dealing with special operations, analysis, scientific support and reviewing old, mainly murder, cases. The crime department will be taking on 200 new detectives to reach its full complement of almost 1,300 officers.
Mr Chris Patten, in his reform of policing report, described the old RUC special branch as a "force within a force", and proposed the subsuming of the special branch into the general crime branch, as the PSNI and Policing Board now say has happened.
Sinn Féin, in refusing to endorse the PSNI, has argued that despite the changes, the former special branch philosophy of the RUC is still inherent in the new police service.
Mr Bradley, however, rejected this contention when yesterday welcoming the revamping of the police's criminal division.
"I think there is now a structure in being, a personnel in being, and I think there is an oversight in being that makes it impossible to have a force within a force," Mr Bradley said.
Mr Attwood said not only was the old special branch system a feature of the past, but there were strict systems of accountability in place to ensure that the police would be fully answerable to the people it served.
Sinn Féin's complaints against the police were no longer sustainable and the party should join the board, he said.
"They are only playing politics with this issue," added Mr Attwood.
The Sinn Féin spokesman on policing, Mr Gerry Kelly, said that "no amount of PSNI spin will deflect from the reality that we do not currently have an acceptable policing service".
Mr Kinkaid described his department as a "one-stop shop approach to the investigation of serious terrorist offences and organised crime".
He explained that a major feature of the department is that it will deal with all serious crime on a Northern Ireland basis.
