PSNI officers maintained a low-key presence yesterday in the Garnerville estate in east Belfast amid a furore over its handling of expulsions of LVF-associated figures by the rival UVF at the weekend.
Reduced numbers of UVF associates remained on the streets in the estate yesterday as senior PSNI officers said "evidence gathering" was continuing which could lead to follow-up prosecutions.
Garnerville residents openly welcomed the paramilitary action, claiming it was ridding the community of crime and racketeering.
However, Sinn Féin and the SDLP denounced the hands-off approach adopted by the PSNI in the face of alleged paramilitary activity.
Sinn Féin said police tactics would have been different in a nationalist setting. Gerry Kelly said the PSNI response proved there was loyalist collusion in a "very public way".
SDLP spokesman and Policing Board member Alex Attwood said it was a "bad day" for Northern Ireland policing.
East Belfast MP and DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson said the police were in a no-win situation and warned that lives would be lost unless both sides in the loyalist feud stepped back.
Mr Kelly said loyalist intimidation in east Belfast reminded nationalists of expulsions by loyalists and the failure of the state to protect them. "This has echoes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when nationalists across this city were forced to flee their homes in the face of loyalist and state violence," he said.
"The treatment received by Seán Kelly, currently interned without any justification, also contrasts sharply with the attitude adopted yesterday in Garnerville towards those involved in the takeover of an entire estate."
He referred to loyalist paramilitary attacks on three Catholic churches in Ballymena, Co Antrim; an arson attack on the Holy Cross church in Ardoyne; and attacks on Catholic homes and businesses in north Antrim which police say were linked and organised.
"All of this and the PSNI reaction to it is a demonstration in a very public way that policing is still not right," said Mr Kelly.
Mr Attwood, a west Belfast Assembly member, said: "There was the appearance, not the reality, that in certain parts of this city, people who were in or who were associated with, or who may have been working on behalf of the paramilitary organisations, that their writ ran."
He said that amounted to "a very bad message, a very bad image and a very bad signal for policing. I think there's people in the police who know all that".
Two mediators, a Presbyterian minister and a community worker, are understood to be continuing their efforts to ease tensions and end the sporadic LVF-UVF feud which has claimed two lives in the past month.
Chief Supt Wesley Wilson, in charge of the Garnerville operation, defended the ongoing police action, saying it was not a "bad day" for policing, but a difficult one.