PSNI Chief Constable Huge Orde has defended comments he made on Wednesday that some of the opponents to police reform came from within the force itself.
Mr Orde also said his comments were taken out of context in a speech that lasted more than 20 minutes and said that anyone who believed that all 9,000 police officers were in favour of reform should "wake up".
"I'd confess to being slightly disappointed with the one-liners the Northern Ireland press choose to pick out," he said. "The whole trust of my speech on Wednesday was to say how much had been achieved. 99 per cent of my speech had been about the professionalism of my force," he added.
Mr Orde said that some of the press reports on his speech to the US Committee on Foreign Policy amounted to "irresponsible journalism".
"The point I was making was one line in a 20-minute speech. I made the point that there were a small number of people who did not want us to succeed.
Change is difficult and people don't like change," he said.
Asked why he had said that he was getting more support from the US for a new PSNI training college than he was getting from his own government, Mr Orde said he had always been disappointed that there had not been any "real movement" on the training college.
"I also said that we in the police service had not got our act together. So it wasn't me throwing my toys around, it was simply saying we could have moved more quickly.
"We should have gripped this reform from the beginning and we didn't," he said.
Mr Orde hit out at the lack of bureaucratic support for the proposed training college.
"I think the issue is one of money and there is a very large file on the police college, but there isn't any action. I have spoken personally to Trimble and Durkan.
"I went to the policing board to see Mr Durkan to raise the issue in relation to a site.
"One would have thought there would be a lot of energy behind making sure that I had the hygiene factors in place to deliver the sort of police force that everyone wants to deliver, I didn't get the support there either," he said.
He said that the policing board were 100 per cent behind the training college, and vowed that it would be built before he leaves Northern Ireland.
"Even if I have to build it myself," he added.
He also hit out at the strict criteria placed on PSNI officers taking part in US-based training programmes.
The criteria, put in place by the US Congress, prohibit PSNI members that are suspected of human rights abuses.
"I have some difficulty with that issue because I find it frankly, a little offensive, to suggest that I would dream of sending anyone like that to another place.
"I have to sign some forms and I wondered if, when I was invited here now, I wouldn't have to fill out a form promising that I had not been involved in human rights abuses in Northern Ireland," he said.
He added that the PSNI would have to keep the US informed of its reforms, because the US had a lot of power and had the potential to do huge damage if misinformed.
"If it is not properly informed, it has the potential to do huge damage. We have to play in this field. We may not like it, but we have to play in this field," he said.
Asked about recent loyalist violence, he said he intended to crack down on loyalist paramilitaries in the same way he had cracked down on Jamaican gangs in London before he moved to Northern Ireland.
He said this could be achieved by regularly arresting loyalist leaders.
"There is an analogy with my policing work in south London with the Jamaican gangs. They were disorganised and killing communities that didn't trust us. So it was actually quite similar, bizarrely.
"We dealt with them [the Jamaican gangs] by arresting them for all sorts of other things. We'd arrest them for anything, which is what we are hoping to do with the loyalists, just to take them out of circulation."