"A little hapless, clumsy and unwise, but ultimately loveable. At worst, he may be hamstrung by the idea that policemen or women have to be tougher than `normal' men and women.'' Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...Chief Constable George Hamilton.
But who described him like this? Her opening line was, "The job title `head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland' sounds a bit like a punchline. The joke would be about challenges or diplomacy. It might be an amusing example of a job that a klutzy or tactless sitcom character would be ill-suited to doing.''
In an Observer column by the humorist Victoria Coren, that was the only suggestion that this might be a particularly hard society to police. Her focus was George Hamilton’s recent late-night tweet exchanges with a junior officer, about policing strains. She wrote: "You can’t be telling exhausted, depressed, put-upon police officers to dry their eyes or quit. Imagine if they quit! What kind of force do you think you’d be left with? It would be like 1960s Soho all over the country.''
Hamilton, she said, made a prompt and abject apology-video, coming across as ‘a kind and sympathetic man to deal with personally.’ Possess your souls in patience, local readers, for an appropriate response to that one - preferably without a mobile next or near you.
Coren makes no claim to political insight. A witty television performer with a sideline as a professional poker-player, she knows enough to joke that Hamilton’s job is unsuited to a klutzy, tactless etc. Though not enough to refrain from musing on what it takes to be in the Northern Ireland police. "It’s not the army. The police are supposed to be just like us, there to help and to keep the peace. There is a place for delicate flowers – or there should be.''
Let’s ignore that ‘all over the country’ bit. She’s unlikely to be an unconscious yet deeply convinced unionist. What we’re entitled to note is that nobody here is likely to voice her instinctive warmth towards Hamilton, and not because nobody can imagine him to be personally ‘kind and sympathetic.’
His personality is irrelevant. Many must have read the tweeting story with scepticism, lack of sympathy coloured by recent history. Loughinisland, say, the Ombudsman’s report on which found serious fault with PSNI officers, which Hamilton flicked aside with a neutrally-voiced but unmistakeable dig at Ombudsman Michael Maguire. Maguire hadn’t suggested prosecutions, had he, so did that suggest he knew they wouldn’t stand up? Not the kindest observation, echoed by at least one unionist politician.
Limited Hamilton empathy also over the Billy Wright poster in Dungannon, glorying in an LVF attack that killed four men down the road in Carrickmore. The Chief Constable’s chief care appeared to be for the officer who justified leaving the poster alone because it would be ‘perceived by some to be offensive, but not by others.’ Inspector Keith Jamieson then bumbled into a mission statement that police must ‘try for balance between the rights of one community over another.’
No abject apology followed promptly from the inspector, or his boss, for this insult to Protestants as well as Catholics, and the inspector’s ignorance of what police must ‘try for’.
A full month after the poster appeared, Hamilton told the Policing Board that Jamieson had used the ‘wrong words’, which caused hurt and offence, that he’d been keen to put this right and the poster had been taken down. An Assistant Chief Constable said legal advice was that the poster did not break the law. Which prompted Hamilton to say it was up to Stormont to clarify and strengthen the law, and the ACC to then lament that police were often left dealing with a ‘societal and cultural’ problem, ‘conundrums and challenges every day.’
Spot on if he was thinking out loud, though unwilling to say it plainly even to himself, that default PSNI leadership thinking is still more unionist than not. The PSNI is not the RUC, nor is it the civilianised service envisaged by the Patten commission. Some of that is because elements in the Catholic community still try to kill police, especially Catholic officers, some because the political leadership of the Protestant community tailor their support to the loyalist paramilitary mood.
Victoria Coren stumbled into the non-humorous issue of policing a divided society because in London media eyes (and those of Dublin) ‘post-conflict NI’ is a blur. (As, from London, is much of the UK.) Coren can be very funny - but not about this place.
