The Northern Ireland Police Service has experienced "a real culture change" in recent years, the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, Mrs Nuala O'Loan, yesterday told Congressional leaders in Washington.
Speaking to a special meeting on Capitol Hill to discuss policing reform in Northern Ireland, Mrs O'Loan said serious complaints against PSNI officers had fallen significantly.
The Ombudsman's declaration came just hours after the US-based Friends of Sinn Féin took a quarter-page advertisement in the New York Times, which cost up to $25,000, to condemn the PSNI.
The future of policing in Northern Ireland is expected to dominate discussions in the White House today between US President Bush and Northern Ireland political leaders.
The PSNI, said Mrs O'Loan, is moving towards "real community-based policing", while the type of complaints levelled against officers has changed in the three years since her office was established.
"There has been an overall drop in the numbers of complaints: from 3,590 in 2001, to 3,340 in 2002, and to 2,954 in 2003," she told a meeting of the United States/Helsinki Commission on Security Co-operation in Europe.
There has been "a marked decrease" in the number of more serious alleged abuses, including alleged assault, intimidation and harassment - which now make up 34 per cent of the total, compared with 50 per cent in 2001.
She said she believed that some of her past recommendations "may be partly behind" the reduction in the use of firearms by the police. There were just five such cases last year, as against 21 in 2001. Similarly, the number of complaints about other use of firearms (such as assault by firearm) has dropped from 40 in 2001, to 25 in 2002 and to 12 in 2003.
"I believe these reductions have been achieved in part through my office working with the PSNI regarding problems we have identified during our investigations of complaints," she said.
"I have also noticed that officers are now coming forward to my office about wrongdoing and to give evidence against their fellow officers. This is the true face of modern policing," she said.
Meanwhile, the PSNI Chief Constable, Mr Hugh Orde, who is also in Washington, said he believed the Bush administration had noted "the substantial changes" that have taken place in NI policing.
The NI crime rate has fallen: "It is a litmus test. You don't achieve those sorts of crime reductions without community support.
"This is a recognition of our determination to deliver first-class policing," said Mr Orde.
