Cramphorn delivers stark warning to Policing Board

The Acting Chief Constable of the PSNI has lambasted public representatives and the community at large for failing to confront the problems facing policing in Northern Ireland.

In a robust statement to members of the Policing Board's Corporate Policy Committee, Colin Cramphorn contended that the police had "taken all the pain of the new beginning for policing, but had yet to see any of the gain".

That gain could only be achieved if society as a whole, and its representatives, played the part envisaged for them in the Patten report, he said. And after three months of protracted violence orchestrated by all paramilitary groups, Mr Cramphorn said that public representatives had failed to create the "benign policing environment" predicating the downsizing of manpower.

"That has still not occurred. Civic society and the body politic has not yet delivered. As a consequence the benign policing environment envisaged by Patten has never materialised and the over-stretch on the capability of the police service to meet the demands made upon it is a direct consequence of this failure," he said.

Wider civic society, he added, which did not see itself directly affected, had not been moved to require its representatives to find solutions. "It has been too easy to label the problem as a policing problem, and to turn away," he said.

He told Board members that the operational capability of the PSNI has been over-stretched, and that cumulative pressures on resources meant that police were "simply responding to emergency calls and little else".

Studiously avoiding the term "ceasefire", Mr Cramphorn also pointed out that the level of terrorist threat from republican and loyalist paramilitary groups was running at its highest since what he described as the "cessation of hostilities" in 1997. He said countering this threat was "hugely resource intensive" and was a "significant diversion of resources away from normal policing."

The Acting Chief Constable said that the demands of ordinary crime, coupled with the loss of large numbers of experienced officers over the past 18 months, left the police "unable to resource such investigations to nationally recommended standards".

Mr Cramphorn also spoke of the cost of policing the disturbances – with 731 officers injured in the 12 months to July 31 – and the cumulative impact of working excessively long hours with little opportunity of rest and recuperation.

"Such levels of activity cannot be sustained indefinitely," he declared.

(GB)