IT'S appropriate during the Olympics that the race between the PSNI and unionist politicians - you couldn't call them leaders - to issue the stupidest statements is a dead heat.
They both share the medal but it's fool's gold.
Yet again internecine fighting among loyalist factions has resulted in stabbing, beating and finally murder.
Everyone in places like Tiger Bay and Ballysillan knows the killing of Boreland was part of the struggle to succeed the self-appointed so-called `brigadier' who fled to Scotland at the beginning of the month after having been bested in a contest with the UVF.
The gang leader who fled had made peoples' lives a misery for 18 months while the police completely failed to `keep people safe' as their mantra has it.
Their whole approach is wrong and requires a total rethink. Instead, the PSNI issued a statement of gobbledegook that was arrogant, meaningless, patronising and yes, stupid.
Among other claptrap the PSNI said they engaged with people - paramilitaries - who could "constructively assist us in keeping people safe".
Our "code of ethics and statutory obligations guide us". If that were so the guidance leads only one direction: prosecution.
The facts are clear. All the evidence points to one conclusion. The policing policy has failed. By July this year assaults by loyalist paramilitaries were running at their highest rate since 2010.
We're back to the old cliché of doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. Police condemned the UVF for their role in organising rioting in east Belfast in 2012 and 2013.
Their then leaders are still profiting from drug dealing and government money. Many UVF and UDA men are in receipt of public money as community workers though they have no qualifications for such a job and some are so thick they couldn't find their wee finger to bite it.
Real community workers like Pastor Jack McKee are exasperated. As he says, people in the community the police are supposed to keep safe `feel powerless'.
John McBurney, recently on the panel to advise Stormont on getting rid of paramilitaries, said last week, you can't be "brigadiers at night and community workers during the day".
Yet in loyalists districts they are and disgracefully the police deal with them.
The PSNI statement is itself an admission of policy failure because it can't point to a single achievement which might lead to the removal of the incubus of loyalist gangsterism.
It just says in gobbledegook, `We know best.' They don't. That's evident.
Running alongside them towards the fool's gold medal are unionist politicians. They get away with equally vacuous statements like Jeffrey Donaldson's.
Instead of addressing the issue he attacked the messenger Raymond McCord. Raymond McCord had hit the nail on the head when he said unionist politicians "stand with them [loyalists] at protests, they go to meetings with them knowing who they are. They are the terrorists who murder people in their own community".
It has always been thus. In the 1980s with the UVF murder campaign in full spate, Belfast unionists had no problem electing Hughie Smyth, a senior UVF man, deputy lord mayor of Belfast.
UVF gunmen were regularly guests of unionist councillors in the city hall. Remember the unionist politicians walking into the talks which led to the Good Friday Agreement among serried ranks of UVF and UDA, both illegal organisations?
As for the weasel words that unionists queuing on 11 July 2014 to sign up to the pan-unionist `graduated response' alongside acknowledged UVF and UDA men was `to promote peace', give us a break.
It was a cowardly disgrace. Instead of publicly appearing with such men, unionists, some of whom played footsie with killers in the 1970s and1980s, should stop applauding them on public platforms and certainly never make common cause with killers.
It can't be because they're afraid of losing votes to them. After all, the UDA hasn't got a political party and the UVF's front party the PUP barely registers 2 per cent in Belfast and zero elsewhere. It has to be a darker reason than that.
Until unionists meet the PSNI, exert pressure to change their policy and arrest the gangsters you have to assume the worst of unionist politicians.
