NI police at 'breaking point'

Police in Northern Ireland are over-stretched and some officers are at “breaking point”, the province’s policing chief warned today.

After 15 months of continuous street disorder and with the threat from dissident republican and loyalist paramilitary groups running at the highest level for five years, the cumulative pressures on resources left “little to deliver ordinary day-to-day policing,” said Acting Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn.

In a hard-hitting message to the Policing Board, Mr Cramphorn revealed: “In many areas we are simply responding to emergency calls and little else.”

That, he said, had the effect of reducing policing with the community to an “unfulfilled aspiration” on all too many occasions.

He delivered his worrying insight after a further night of loyalist rioting in east Belfast left nine more officers injured and as Northern Ireland Security Minister Jane Kennedy met Sinn Fein representatives.

They demanded that independent monitors be placed at sectarian flashpoints across Belfast in a bid to identify ringleaders orchestrating street violence.

Mr Cramphorn said by putting themselves between the warring factions in certain areas police had “prevented them from descending into an orgy of violence that would have surely cost many more lives and caused widespread destruction”.

However, he warned the pressures of constant frontline duty were getting to the men and women of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, with some reaching breaking point.

It was not just the injuries suffered in riots, some 731 in the 12 months to the end of July, but the cumulative impact of working excessively long hours week after week, month after month, with little opportunity for any rest and recuperation.

The police chief said: “The cumulative effect of this is to generate levels of fatigue and tiredness which diminish the effectiveness and the quality of the officers’ contributions when they are at work.

“Such levels of activity cannot be sustained indefinitely.”

He revealed during a meeting with the Policing Board’s Corporate Policy Committee: “There are now worrying instances occurring where individual officers have come to breaking point.

“For example last week in east Belfast in the middle of serious public disorder, one officer suffered a complete psychological collapse.

“An officer with a heretofore excellent work and attendance record will now be on sick leave for an indeterminate period.”

Figures show that 10% of PSNI regulars and full-time reservists are currently on sick leave.

The wider community was deceiving itself if it thought the impact of an over-stretched service was confined to closely defined geographical areas mainly in Belfast, he said.

The lack of capability to address the policing priorities each and every community had, was directly caused by the failure to find a solution to “the interface tensions bedevilling Belfast in particular”.

Added to that was the manpower being used to thwart the threat to life posed by the dissident republican and certain loyalist paramilitary groups and the excessive major crime investigation burden being shouldered as a result of terrorist attacks and sectarian street violence.

“Wherever you live or work in Northern Ireland, it is affecting you,” he said.

The large number of major crime investigations – particularly murders which were disproportionate to the size of the population served – coupled with the loss of large numbers of experienced detectives over the past 18 months under Patten Report plans to downsize police numbers, meant that “we are unable to resource such investigations to nationally recommended standards”.

The efforts of police and troops on the streets had managed to deliver “the most tranquil marching season for five years”, he said.

Because of that the wider society which did not see itself directly affected had not been moved to require its representatives to find solutions.

The Police Service had seen “all the pain of the new beginning for policing, but had yet to see any of the gain which was the rationale for that new beginning being embraced”, he said.

The gain was not within the gift of the police service itself.

“It can only be achieved if civil society as a whole, and those selected as representatives thereof, play the part envisaged for them in the report of the International Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland”.

That had still not occurred: “Civil society and the body politic has not delivered.”

Mr Cramphorn concluded: “As a consequence the benign policing environment envisaged by Patten has never materialised and the overstretch on the capability of the Police Service to meet the demands made upon it is a direct consequence of this failure.”