The North's Chief Constable has said he does not believe a return to the policy of 50:50 recruitment is the way to increase the number of Catholic officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
"I think it's had its moment," Simon Byrne said. "I don't know if 50:50 would be the answer any more."
But he warned that “on the current trajectory, you’ve got a number of dilemmas in that the progress made by 50:50 risks being undermined by the slow process of retirement.
“If we’re not filling [at] the same rate Catholic officers retiring with recruitment, you’ll see a slip.”
In an interview with The Irish Times to mark the 20th anniversary on Thursday of the formation of the PSNI, Mr Byrne said police needed to “work with politicians and the community itself to unlock those barriers” preventing people from a nationalist background from joining the police.
“It’s not solely a policing issue that we hold all the cards for,” he said.
He also condemned instances he had “seen personally where politicians . . . have arced across institutions of accountability to criticise me or the police service” which he said “doesn’t help”. He issued an appeal “to ask politicians to respect the institutions of accountability and to conduct business through them, because that’s what we all signed up for.”
Mr Byrne has written to political parties and faith leaders in Northern Ireland asking for their support in encouraging people to join the police, saying that he would "greatly value your continued support in promoting the benefits of a career in policing both to individuals and the wider community".
Recruitment campaign
Under the policy of 50:50 recruitment, the percentage of Catholic officers rose from 8 per cent when the PSNI was formed in 2001 to about 30 per cent when the 50:50 system ended in 2011. Currently 32 per cent of PSNI officers are Catholic and 20 per cent of civilian staff; 30 per cent of police officers are female, and 0.59 per cent are from an ethnic minority.
Earlier this week the PSNI launched a recruitment campaign to hire 400 additional officers.
Mr Byrne said “society has changed enormously in 20 years [and] representation is about a more diverse workforce drawn from all our communities”.
This included “bringing more women into policing and seeing more women thrive in policing” as well as making it more attractive to people from black and other minority ethnic backgrounds, and addressing the issues raised by the police’s handling of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Among the factors affecting recruitment are security concerns, budget limitations and controversy over Troubles legacy issues; Mr Byrne said police had tried “every trick in the book” to bring people in “but still the dynamics don’t shift in that fundamental, structural way that I think people wanted.
“So it goes into the next part of the debate, about people in society themselves advocating across communities for a career in policing and helping police officers make that transition, because it’s still a world where people will have concerns in certain parts of the country.”
‘Two-tier’ policing
Asked about the perception within sections of loyalism and unionism of “two-tier” policing, Mr Byrne said the PSNI was listening and “working behind the scenes with politicians and others to try and understand just what is wrong and then develop an agenda.”
Of controversies such as the criticism of the police's handling of the funeral of senior former IRA figure Bobby Storey in June 2020 or the arrest of a survivor of a loyalist gun attack at a commemoration on Belfast's Ormeau Road earlier this year, Mr Byrne said many of these would not have occurred without the pandemic.
“If there were no Covid regulations there’d be no Bobby Storey funeral outcry . . . so a lot of the issues that define policing in a negative way from the unionist/loyalist community just probably wouldn’t have been a factor in anyone’s thinking.
“But we also have to accept that we are where we are and some of these totemic events have produced criticism and political concern.”
Referring to multiple calls for his resignation by unionist politicians, he said it was “quite legitimate to hold someone like me to account [but] that repeat, repeat, repeat creates its own narrative, and apart from the outcries and [calls for] resignation no one is really saying, what is the solution?
“We have to step back and realise policing is a complex business . . . and at times policing will do things that are unpopular.”
His key priorities, he said, were to grow the number of officers to the 7,500 envisaged by Patten, to “transform the relationship between officers and staff and the public by investigating in digital technology” and to modernise and improve the policing estate.
