If the majority in Northern Ireland can be convinced that at least in principle the agencies of government are there to serve everyone, today's renovated state has a chance of settling down. The North is some distance down that road already. Which is why a few men, with no political views they can express persuasively in words, blasted two policemen at point-blank range inside recent days. To two people and their families, the injuries are all too real.
The communal effect will take some time to estimate because the gunmen targeted a service as well as two individuals, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland is still at an early stage of development.
This was far from the first time that PSNI officers have been shot at, or injured. One of the more ridiculous recent aspects of loyalist paramilitary refusal to even consider decommissioning was the statement from the UDA in southeast Antrim that they would be keeping their guns because dissident republicans had attacked police. Loyalists have shot at police repeatedly.
But it has little enough significance because the relationship between loyalist paramilitaries and the police has little to do with relations between Protestants in general and the police. It is also a relationship which is almost beyond intelligent examination, but we'll come back to that.
For the purposes of bedding down the peace, relations between police and northern Catholics are still fairly central. The first policeman injured who, like the second, managed with remarkable resilience to drive away from his attackers, is a Catholic from Derry's Bogside.
He was an easy target - as were so many off-duty RUC officers shot on their own doorsteps - and may well have been singled out for that reason alone. But the supposition is that this was meant to discourage others.
A crude form of intimidation, like the IRA targeting of Catholics who joined the Ulster Defence Regiment in its first years, and the steady pressure on families that kept many RUC Catholic members away from their home places for the most part for decades. Contrary to unionist belief, intimidation by the IRA was never the only reason for the lack of Catholics in the RUC, but it certainly played a part.
The PSNI has managed to turn around the old pattern of overwhelmingly Protestant RUC membership to a point where 23 per cent of their officers now are Catholic. The debate about policing the North is far from concluded. (It could be argued that it is considerably farther on than in the Republic, however, which has small enough cause for superior looks northwards.) There are worries about inherited bad habits in record-keeping, among other things, and lingering questions about the use of agents and the direction of intelligence which feed even the most rational and moderate theories about collusion between security forces and paramilitaries.
The Police Ombudsman is no longer the implacable Nuala O'Loan but a retired Canadian policeman who disparaged investigations of the past before even applying for the job. One of Mrs O'Loan's last reports uncovered the saga of Special Branch entanglement with the UVF in north Belfast, a story that continued for years and which defies straightforward explanation. This week's emergence of a self-outed and self-described Special Branch agent, in the branch of the UDA which has renamed itself "Beyond Conflict" while refusing to give up guns, begs more questions. The PSNI's Special Branch is supposed to be a new organism, old practices rooted out.
Most people in Northern Ireland now come in contact with police on a superficial level, as in most peaceful societies. Uniformed officers on traffic duty or going door to door after minor incidents are no longer the embattled or belligerent force of old, torn between the irreconcilable pressures of having to function on a war footing while also being first on the scene at gruesome road accidents: breaking in a door to do a house-search one minute, delivering the worst of sad news the next.
The evolution of peacetime policing involves recruitment which has set out to change the membership of the service and a more disparate and, ideally, a more effective range of invigilators. But the expectations of a new age are as important. A reformed and more representative police service needs to behave differently but also needs to look steadily more civilianised.
Bikes, foot patrols and brightly painted cars all matter, and the priority for those who want to turn the clock back is obvious. Making people afraid again would be a major victory: making people fear police and police fear the people.
The best hope is the nature of the enemy. Calling your group the "Real IRA" is something of a giveaway. Meant to pour scorn on those who followed the Adams-McGuinness line, it comes across instead as posturing in the darkness.
The North has had darkness enough.