US Senator makes submission to Patten commission
by Ned Kelly
American Senator Tom Hayden, speaking to An Phoblacht shortly after
the public launch of a submission to the Patten Commission compiled
by a group of American policing experts, said that cosmetic changes
in the composition of the Los Angeles police had failed to bring
about reforms.
The report is based on the lessons of Los Angeles police reform
following the serious breakdown in police-community relations that
led to the explosions of violence in the city in 1965 and in 1992
following the acquittal of white policemen who were video taped
savagely beating Afro-American Rodney King.
The submission came about following a meeting that Hayden, Merrick
Bobb, Robert Garcia, Paul Hoffman, Constance Rice and John Van de
Kamp, all experts on policing issues, had while the Patten Commission
was on a fact-finding tour to the US in January.
Hayden stressed that merely altering the composition of the police
would fail to address the more important underlying problems. He
added that in Los Angeles many of the racial problems in society were
being internalised and reproduced within the police force.
In a joint statement the American group listed key points that
experience had taught them were crucial in developing new
police-community relations.
They pointed to the need to ``sit down with a blank sheet of paper'' in
order to ask `what is the ideal? What is the mission?' Such a
starting point was vital as opposed to attempting ``to `fix' an
entrenched, time-bound, tradition-orientated institution''.
They also pointed out the powerful and beneficial social effects that
changes in the policing status quo could have. The difficulties of
the RUC being controlled directly by the NIO and the transition from
operating within a de facto war culture to a democratic and
egalitarian ethos and institutions were also raised.
Their experience had taught them that it was a mistake to believe
that accountability could be achieved without independent mechanisms
of investigation and review, with disciplinary power. The role of
empowered citizens in a democratic political process via local
elections with strong powers of redress was important along with
meaningful guarantees of due process and stringent protection against
the abuse of power.
They pointed out that despite reform commissions, a stronger
tradition of civilian authority and significant changes in the
leadership and policy of the Los Angeles police and sheriffs
departments, they had still fallen short of the twin goals that are
also paramount to the successful creation of a new policing service
in the Six Counties, that of an ``accountable policing service
reflecting the multi-cultural society it serves'' and ``a police force
operating with trust and confidence in communities where
disadvantage, poverty and powerlessness continue to foster suspicion
and rage''.
In a damning sentence the submission underlines what is at the heart
of the problem with the RUC and other crown force organisations: ``The
moral force of what ought to be is weakened by the collision with the
reality of what `is'''
The internal `code of silence' operating within Los Angeles was also
pointed out as a ``powerful deterrent to change'', where the culture
emanating from the top down within the RUC of such a `code of
silence' is even more apparent. Despite new proposals and support for
them from the highest levels in American society following the Watt
riots or uprisings of 1965, failures were ``due to lack of will to
agree to implement agreed-upon reform proposals.''
The effects of affirmative action employment strategies developed in
1981 following a federal anti-discrimination settlement, the Blake
case, are also analysed. Ten years after the positive discrimination
action, the vast majority of women, African-Americans and Latinos
remained in lower rung positions, including 82% of African-Americans
in 1991. The submission states the difficulty in ``pouring new wine
into old skins'' as a problem likely to be faced by a new policing
service that fails to tackle the current culture of the RUC, let
alone its current leadership who rose through the ranks during some
of the worst RUC abuses of power and collusion with Loyalist death
squads.
Following the Rodney King beating by LAPD officers in 1991 it was
discreetly suggested that Chief Darryl Gates step down after 42 years
with the LAPD.
Merrick Bobb, one of the submission's authors, was appointed by the
county five years after the Christopher Commission into the violence
that erupted after the Rodney King affair to examine the progress of
reforms. Bobb stated that despite improvements reforms had not gone
as far as was possible or required, and significantly that the `code
of silence' persisted.
The issues the submission comes back to again and again - the use of
force, the code of silence, and the lack of accountability - are
lessons that the Patten Commission will now take forward into their
blueprint for a new policing service for the Six Counties. Unless the
mistakes from other parts of the world and truth about the actions
and the culture of the RUC are part of that solution we may well find
ourselves 35 years further down the line regretting the missed
opportunity.
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)