The Patten report says policing should be a collective, community responsibility, a partnership for community safety. It is another way of saying that policing is too important to be left to the police alone.
If the far-reaching reform of policing in Northern Ireland is to succeed, the community will have a vital part to play. Indeed, the community at large will have to recast its perceptions and attitudes to the police every bit as radically and fundamentally as the police service itself will change.
Above all, long-standing mindsets on both sides of the sectarian and political divide and towards the RUC in the Republic, will have to be jettisoned and replaced by new concepts of consent, co-operation and participation in the policing process.
To understand what needs to be done, and why, it is worth recalling the fatal blunders made at the time of partition in 1922, when the RUC was formed, which identified policing with politics and the defence of the state, creating a legacy of contention which is only now being recognised and has yet to be fully remedied. Having avoided inclusion in the new Free State, the Ulster unionists clamoured for a strong security force of "reliable" men under their control. They wanted the ability to effectively resist any future coercion by the IRA or the Dublin government, especially as many feared that Britain, which had banned them from raising any military force, might not come to their aid to defend the separated province.
Thus one of the new unionist administration's first acts was to set up a parliamentary committee on police reorganisation. The main recommendation was for a new, 3,000-strong police force under a single command for Northern Ireland, to be called the Ulster Constabulary.
Setting the new force fatally and firmly in the unionist firmament, the committee also submitted that the king be asked to award the "royal" prefix to it, "in recognition of their loyalty in the most arduous and dangerous circumstances", and because it would also "give great satisfaction to the loyal population of the Northern area who have always been noted for their attachment to the Throne and Constitution".
Its most controversial recommendation, to which several committee members recorded reservations, was that a one-third quota of the new force should be reserved for Catholics. When it came into existence officially in June 1922, it had been awarded the royal prefix, and tasked with the dual role of protecting the new state and its borders from armed subversion and enforcing law and order.
Efforts to fill the one-third quota of Catholics quickly failed, not least because there was little enthusiasm for the concept among the unionist leadership. The RUC was thus committed to the unionist cause, which combined with the long-standing anti-police instinct among nationalists to fatally inhibit its acceptability to the Northern Catholic community.
It was seen in the eyes of the Protestants as being their defenders, and in the eyes of the Catholic community as being agents of the unionist government.
In the succeeding years, unionists maintained a proprietorial attitude - they were "their" police and a bulwark against subversion by the IRA and other enemies of Ulster and "British" by tradition and culture. The force was kept on a tight rein, and every aspect of RUC policy and operational activity was subjected to the closest political scrutiny and control.
At the same time the police were badly treated by successive unionist administrations At the end of the second World War, scarce linoleum was torn from police station floors to cover the office floors of senior civil servants. When the RUC eventually got patrol cars, the heaters were taken out lest the constables might be too comfortable. Little wonder the ill-equipped, poorly-trained, under-strength force was overwhelmed in August 1969, causing the British army to come in to quell communal violence.
Although unionists have physically and verbally attacked the RUC during the most recent years of conflict, they have maintained their proprietorial stance. A hypocritical aspect of the post-Patten debate has been the "hands off the RUC" campaign, with people like the Rev Ian Paisley, who often confronted the police in the past and has even called on them to mutiny, masquerading as their defenders.
The long-standing unionist mindset must now change. The police are not there to defend the Border or the constitution, nor to be the playthings of politicians. They are, and must be seen as, "everybody's police".
The Catholic/nationalist/ republican community must also transform its attitudes to the police and the policing process. The way to ensure that policing arrangements are satisfactory and sensitive to their needs is not, as they have done for almost 80 years, to boycott the police and the mechanisms that exist to regulate them, and then stand on the sidelines complaining about how inadequate or ineffective they are.
Above all, the minority community leaders and elected representatives, together with the Catholic hierarchy and priests, must go on an offensive to tell their community that policing is a vital public service, a worthwhile career for their young people and an honourable profession to follow.
With the notable exception of Seamus Mallon, whose remarks following the award of the George Cross to the RUC in November were both generous and constructive, there has been an unforgivable silence and a failure to commend, or even explain, the Patten report to their constituencies and congregations.
Peter Mandelson has now signalled the most fundamental shakeup for policing since 1922. The RUC will react to it with the same dedicated and innovative approach with which it traversed the difficult years of violence and will enthusiastically embrace the challenges of change to meet the demands of policing in a more conventional environment.
It remains to be seen if the entire community, and more importantly, its political and religious leaders, have the matching courage and vision to actively participate in the process and play their essential part in creating in a new policing order; a new order built on the principles of consent and co-operation, with a fully representative police service drawing its members from all sections of the community.
The way the post-Patten debate has been conducted is far from encouraging.