A Malignant Menage d'trois

By Anthony McIntyre

Next Monday shall see UTV's Insight, with typical investigative skill, unpick the threads that have been weaved together post-Patten to fashion a renamed garment now termed the PSNI. While we do not yet know either Insight's contents or conclusions, the very nature of the issues it intends to confront may lead some viewers to conclude that behind the facade of a name change, buttressed by RUC front men and women immersed in a discourse - although crucially not a culture - of human rights, sits the real policing agenda in the North. Whatever the new gloss, the nervous over-the-shoulder glance at Nuala O'Loan, the reworded title, the primary function of policing here is essentially what it has always been - political rather than civic. The PSNI, no less than the RUC, is both the cutting edge of the British state's willingness to maintain the union and the guarantor of the state's own skewed application of the consent principle. The police will of course pursue firemen who murder their lover's husband, arrest drug dealers - if they are not in the UDA, and crack down hard on those who violently prey on the elderly. Just as they have always done. Equally so, they will treat with absolute contempt legal safeguards put in place to protect the citizen from the type of police abuses that were so frequent in the past; and which some would hope to bamboozle us into believing exist only in the past.

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