Stakeholder

THE recent display of paramilitary strength in south Armagh is a worrying development. More worrying is the medium-term effects on community confidence following the police decision to withdraw.

Following the incident unnamed police officers said they felt vulnerable policing parts of south Armagh.

Hardly the departing message Sir Hugh Orde would have chosen or a ringing endorsement for the authority of the Policing Board.

Only a few weeks ago the Policing Board on the recommendation of the Police Service of Northern Ireland accepted the closure of 26 police stations.

In fairness the majority of stations were unused and the ultimate decision is operational and decided by the chief constable.

The argument for closure tends to run along the lines that they are uneconomical to run, use up valuable resources for their protection and that ultimately they prevent the chief constable from targeting frontline services.

That’s the argument and there is some merit to it. Unfortunately the argument wears somewhat thin when incidents like the one in south Armagh demonstrate how criminal elements can blatantly flout the law in the face of police officers who feel ‘vulnerable’ because of the lack of operational support.

In a recent interview Sir Hugh defended the decision of the police officers to withdraw from the south Armagh situation.

Locally many people will feel differently. Orde, as he is wont to do, issued a deflecting broadside at Northern Ireland politicians saying they were not doing enough to tackle sectarianism.

While true, it’s a typical Orde strategy when faced with a policing dilemma.

Last year in the face of loyalist violence which resulted in the injury of police officers, he declared at a high-profile media interview that in his personal opinion he would not give loyalists 50 pence.

This immediately left social development minister Margaret Ritchie out on a limb.

She was pressured by public opinion and media commentary to announce a review of the Conflict Transformation Initiative which was seen by many to be a sop by the Northern Ireland Office to the nonsensical theory of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ UDA.

Despite a mounting political campaign against Mrs Ritchie by the UDA and its sympathisers in the executive and in the Irish and British governments, the chief constable, having launched his verbal grenade, remained diplomatically silent on the matter. Arguably, Sir Hugh leaves the PSNI in a better state than he found it.

To the public, he did not suffer fools gladly, politicians in general and some Policing Board members in particular.

Yet in many ways he was, if not a politician’s policeman, certainly a political policeman.

Many thought that Sir Hugh always had his eye on greater policing prizes available in Britain. Certainly a PSNI chief constable leaves Northern Ireland more decorated than the average Italian general.

He was ready to tackle the powerful Police Federation, whose then leadership, during the implementation of the Patten report appeared to be leading the charge against change in policing.

He was not afraid to stand up to the scrutiny of the office of the Police Ombudsman and the zeal of its former incumbent.

Sir Hugh made himself readily available to the media and ran an internal media operation which was the envy of many a small government.

Some will be relieved to see him depart; others will lament his departure.

That Sir Hugh was committed to impartial policing is beyond doubt.

The multiple layers of scrutiny that now oversee policing in Northern Ireland are onerous and wasteful but Sir Hugh never seemed to mind.

While these structures helped restore confidence in the perception of policing in Northern Ireland, they also increased the paperwork burden on police officers and often distracted them from frontline delivery.

As Sir Hugh was continually and correctly pointing out, the PSNI cannot ‘police the future and the past’.

However, back to the south Armagh incident, it is perception that counts, not the reality. High police visibility is an effective deterrent against crime and it also reduces the fear of crime among the general public.

If dissidents can publicly mount such an exercise in full view of the police, it leads to the inevitable question, who will police south Armagh and places like it?

It is true that the dissidents have little public support but in nationalist areas with a history of fear, suspicion and not reporting to the police, however small the threat, this is no time for standing idly by.