Sinn Féin has decided to recognise the PSNI, but how ready are traditionally hostile communities to follow suit, asks Dan Keenan.
Five years after its formation, the Police Service of Northern Ireland seems to be convincing more people that it is more than the old RUC in a new uniform. Public opinion surveys point to rising levels of confidence in the fledgling police service. The new order, too, is illustrated by the diverse profile of the latest tranche of applications. Some 968 out of more than 7,700 applications last November were from Poles - more than 12 per cent.
After 60 years of the old security regime and 35 years of the Troubles, republican and loyalist voices at street level are recognising the new face of Sir Hugh Orde's police service and are contrasting it favourably with the somewhat darker visage of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
In republican parts of Derry and Belfast, last week's pivotal Sinn Féin ardfheis did not signal love at first sight between the police and the policed. But there is a clear sense that things are not as they were.
In Andersonstown, west Belfast, Community Restorative Justice Ireland works with young people and local communities to try to deal with anti-social behaviour and low-level crime.
THE HEAD OFthe group, Jim Auld, is a republican and a former prisoner and he sees little warmth yet in the new relationship with the PSNI. "Attitudes are the same now as they were last week and last year - it's as simple as that," he says.
"In terms of attitudes towards them, I see very little change. But there is clearly a section of the population that recognises that there needs to be a police service and when something serious happens to them there is no doubt that they need a police service. They are coming to us almost looking for permission but they don't want to jump - make that decision on their own - because they are so unsure about it. And if we say, 'look, it's okay, we're exactly the same as you and if that happened to us we would be going to the police,' it confirms to them that it's okay.
"In serious cases we are being brought more and more into the picture as supporters of them going to the police and we are going to the police with them."
Full engagement between republicans and the police isn't going to be easy, Auld warns.
"When the penny drops that people can go to the police, I think they will start going to them in big numbers. But nationalists don't know policing and, because they don't, expectations of the police service are very high. I think people are going to get frustrated and angry at what they see as the police not doing their job." Normality, he predicts, is when "a PSNI officer can go into a local pub for a drink after work".
His thoughts are reflected by Laurence McKeown, himself a former prisoner and a key figure in the ex- prisoners' group, Coiste na nIarchimí.
"Last Monday morning it wasn't as if everyone around here was embracing the PSNI. In that sense, there's not a lot has happened." However, he concedes, "Their image has changed and they are seen as less militarised. It's still at a very early stage, republicans have clearly taken a step forward. Within the community, people are looking for policing and they need it." People are ready to move on if the police and the bad old days of Castlerea, Gough Barracks and other detention centres are behind us, he adds.
The reason for this, says Prof Brice Dickson of Queen's University, is the plethora of accountability and redress mechanisms that the new police operate.
The law professor, and former chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, says the police we have now are vastly different from those we had. "The reforms have been dramatic and pervasive. Anybody who examines the accountability mechanisms could not help but be impressed by them. They are better than anywhere else that I know of."
Police complaints procedures are much stronger in Belfast than in London, says Prof Dickson. "The de Menezes case [ when an innocent Brazilian was shot dead on an Underground train by a police officer] shows this." He also believes PSNI officers are fully up to date with human rights practice. "I think they have internalised human rights standards and they have a human rights adviser who examines all the policies in place. The code of ethics is riddled with references to best human rights practice and a breach of ethics is a breach of discipline.
"The higher reaches of the police are now completely different from what they were a few years ago - all those new people are very much embedded in a new culture."
IN DERRY, FORMERPolicing Board vice-chairman Denis Bradley looks around at the youth of his community and marvels at the change in a generation.
"The most symbolically significant thing recently was when the PSNI went into St Columb's College to a careers fair. A couple of teachers told me it was wonderful and weird to watch. They went up and asked about the pay and the careers prospects and not one political question about the whole thing. It was the busiest stand of the whole lot. There was another stand for the Catholic priesthood and they got about two people while the police got 200. That shows the numbers who have disengaged from politics, from the constitutional issue - they want to know, 'where's my job, where's my career, where's my future?'
"I also think they feel the ease that the burden has been taken away from policing," says Bradley. "Young people are not stupid. They might say, 'look, there might be a little hassle around all this, but Sinn Féin will come on board and it will be all right politically'." He believes up to 70 per cent of young Catholics have moved on from the old antipathy to the state and its forces and are simply getting on with life.
And the remainder? "The 30 per cent - they just see it as a sell-out and they go for the cliche. It's as if they wanted to be in the war but the war ended before they got there. Time plus good political judgment will see them right."
Sinn Féin, Bradley contends, is good at leading people, especially at grassroots level. "They have the knowledge that resides within the heartlands. The most interesting thing in Derry is on a Saturday night when the police walk the streets at 11pm. Three years ago that created a riot: now there's a riot if they're not there."
IT IS BLINKEREDto assume that the problems of PSNI acceptability lie solely with Catholic communities.
Dawn Purvis found herself at the helm of the tiny UVF-associated Progressive Unionist Party last week after the sudden death of David Ervine.
An Assembly woman for just one day (she was co-opted to fill Ervine's seat for the final session of the Stormont Assembly last Monday) she talks of the mountains still to be climbed by both loyalists and the police.
Would young loyalists join the PSNI? "It doesn't happen because working-class Prods, for want of a better term, don't apply to the PSNI and don't get through [the application process]. I don't know why that is." Referring to a serious mood of disengagement among loyalist working-class people, she adds: "I see it reflected in apathy and increasing marginalisation and in what's happening throughout the wider loyalist community. People like to think that relationships between the police and this community were great. They aren't and they haven't been. After Whiterock [the riots in loyalist areas after a banned Orange march in 2005], things were very strained. But what's needed is relationship-building and working at partnership. People are doing that.
"There is a sea change within the PSNI in terms of working with the community," says Purvis. "Community workers would have said that the police wanted individuals to do their work for them - if there was trouble at an interface the police wanted community workers to come out and resolve it. There was an attitude that it was up to us to do the work to give them a quiet life. That's what the PSNI were viewed as - it's changed now, certainly in terms of the junior levels, the constables and the sergeants at community level." She agrees with Gerry Adams that it is up to the PSNI to earn the trust of the people as much as it is the responsibility of the people to work with the police in the first place.
"That's starting to happen here. That's already happening. There's a lot of work still to do. It's about meeting people face to face and breaking down the barriers and the misconceptions. That's what it's about."