At least “another 10 years of hard work” is required to create a police service in Northern Ireland which is fully representative of the society it serves, a senior police officer has said.
Deputy Chief Constable Mark Hamilton was speaking at the launch of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) recruitment campaign ahead of the 20th anniversary later this week of the formation of the PSNI.
The campaign will seek to hire 400 new officers, which with retirements and other factors is expected to raise police numbers by 100 to 7,100 by March 2022.
The replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) with the PSNI was one of the recommendations on policing put forward in a report by Lord Patten which was commissioned following the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
Under the 50:50 recruitment system - introduced when the PSNI was formed in 2001 - the percentage of Catholic officers rose from eight per cent in 2001 to almost 30 per cent when the 50:50 system ended in 2011.
According to the most recent PSNI statistics, currently 67 per cent of officers are from a Protestant background and 32 per cent are Catholic. Among civilian staff, 78 per cent are Protestant and 20 per cent Catholic.
In recent years the number of Catholic recruits has fallen. During the 2020 recruitment campaign 66 per cent of applicants were Protestant and 31 were Catholic, but of those appointed 75 per cent (144) were Protestant and 24 per cent (46) Catholic.
Mr Hamilton said Lord Patten had “hoped it would take 10 years, and we’re now 20 years past that.
“I do think we are continuing to normalise our society, I think as we make more progress at every level then I think it becomes more attractive for people,” he said.
“The more we can collectively remove the barriers to this then the better, but I do think we’re looking probably at another 10 years of hard work at this at least.”
These barriers, he said, included the police’s role in legacy investigations from the Troubles - a factor in dissuading people from a nationalist background from joining the PSNI - and the dissident republican threat. But wider society also had a role to play in overcoming obstacles preventing Catholics from joining the PSNI, he said.
Mr Hamilton also addressed claims by some loyalists who perceive the policing system as preferential to nationalists, particularly in the wake over the controversy over the police’s handling of the funeral of senior republican Bobby Storey in June 2020.
“The issue of confidence in the loyalist community has been writ large with us for a large part of this year,” he said.
“We understand that, we recognise that, so we’re not complacent at all about what that means,” he said.
He also acknowledged the PSNI faced a “challenge” in convincing young loyalists to join the police and said loyalist areas would be included in the outreach programme scheduled as part of the recruitment campaign.
Speaking in Stormont on Tuesday, the North’s Minister for Justice Naomi Long said criticism of the PSNI by politicians was undermining confidence in policing, and said the “recent narrative around the lack of confidence in policing seems to me to be based on perception rather than fact, and to be far from universal”.
She was answering a question from the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) Assembly member Jim Allister, who asked her what steps she has taken to promote confidence in the PSNI within unionist and loyalist communities.
Ms Long said the “constant narrative around two-tier policing and criticism of the police is what undermines confidence in communities.”
What would build confidence, she said, would be “if we did what was envisaged in the Patten report and took politics out of policing”.
