NCJ Number
185091
Journal
Journal of Law and Society Volume: 27 Issue: 3 Dated: September 2000 Pages: 394-415
Date Published
September 2000
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This article examines the recommendations made by the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland (the Patten Commission).
Abstract
The article examines the political context of policing reform, the contents of the Commission's report and the rejection of its core ideas in the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill published in May 2000. The article's central argument is that the Commission's radical model of policing--a network of regulating mechanisms in which policing becomes everyone's business--failed because it gave insufficient attention, like much modern writing on policing, to the role of the state and the vested interests within policing. Northern Ireland will be left with a traditional, largely undemocratic and unaccountable model of policing with most of the control resting with the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable. The notion of the "operational independence" of the Chief Constable remains intact and the Secretary of State has given himself a vast range of new delegated powers to govern. The message is clear: The people are not to be trusted with policing. Nineteenth-century political relationships live on into the 21st century in Ireland. Notes