A total of 24 police officers were taken away from the unit which investigates domestic abuse and sexual crimes in Northern Ireland to combat last week’s public disorder, a senior Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officer has said.
More than 30 people have been arrested by police investigating the unrest, which began in Ballymena, Co Antrim, on June 9th.
A peaceful protest over the alleged sexual assault of a girl in the town was followed by attacks on the homes of people from ethnic minority backgrounds and police officers – described as “racist thuggery” by the PSNI - and subsequently spread to other towns.
Appearing before the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of MPs at Westminster on Wednesday, Detective Chief Superintendent Zoe McKee said she “cannot begin to describe the challenges within [the] public protection arena in policing currently”.
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The head of public protection at the PSNI, Ms McKee said: “this week alone, I have had 24 officers extracted for public disorder, which actually stemmed from a violence against women and girls offence, and that narrative has been lost in a lot of what has happened in recent weeks.”
The DUP leader, Gavin Robinson, responded this “should be a cool reminder to people out there that some of the outworkings over the last week are having material impact on your ability to do your job to help protect victims”.
“To build on that,” Ms McKee said, “what you’re seeing is the displacement of minority communities, women and children being forced from their homes and crimes committed against them, probably disproportionately, women and children, as a result of the disorder that has happened”.
She said the reallocation of police officers had been the case for the last week, and while it was “slightly going back to normal, we are ready and alive to the fact that that could be ongoing at any minute, as you know it’s a fairly febrile situation”.
Ms McKee also outlined the “significant underfunding challenges” facing police, saying there was a “£21 million (€24.5 million) gap and we have officers at the very lowest level we have ever had in the PSNI, at 6,200 and we should be sitting at 7,500″.
“They are very real challenges which affect how we deliver services and support victims and prosecute offenders for all of the violence against women and girls offence types,” she said.
Ms McKee was one of several people who gave evidence to the scrutiny committee’s session on ending violence against women and girls in Northern Ireland.
The Northern Executive adopted a strategic framework on ending violence against women and girls in 2024, the last jurisdiction in the UK and Ireland to do so.
Dr Siobhán McAlister, senior lecturer in Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast, said survey data showed “very high prevalence rates” in the North, “with 98 per cent of women aged 18 plus having experienced at least one form of gender-based violence in their lives”.
Such violence was “highly underreported,” Ms McAlister said, and Ms McKee described underreporting as “real and significant … it’s a real stubborn challenge” for the PSNI.
Research showed the “main reason they don’t report … is they don’t recognise behaviours as violence” because they were so “commonplace”, Ms McAlister said.
Sonya McMullan, regional services manager at Women’s Aid NI, said “we keep coming down to no resourcing and no money, you know, you’ve got a strategy, but you have no money attached to it, and it’s as simple as that”.
