Opinion

Newton Emerson: For all the support it commands, the PSNI still cannot solve four out of five paramilitary murders

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">The blood-stained shoe of a man (41) targeted in a paramilitary shooting in Derry earlier this month. Picture from PSNI</span>
The blood-stained shoe of a man (41) targeted in a paramilitary shooting in Derry earlier this month. Picture from PSNI The blood-stained shoe of a man (41) targeted in a paramilitary shooting in Derry earlier this month. Picture from PSNI

In my experience, the PSNI is more comfortable arguing the toss on definitions of collusion than discussing its poor performance in solving paramilitary murders.

A decade ago, when the PSNI still had several hundred relatively recent conflict-related murder investigations on its desk, it was managing a conviction rate of 8 per cent.

Since 2007, there have been a further 32 paramilitary-linked murders in Northern Ireland. Only six have so far resulted in a murder or manslaughter conviction - a rate of 19 per cent.

That is an improvement and the PSNI could argue its performance is even better, as many cases are awaiting trial and police are not responsible for the slowness of courts and prosecutors.

In England and Wales, according to figures compiled for the House of Commons, one third of murder cases result in a conviction and another third are awaiting trial, all within a two-year timeframe.

There have been no convictions for the nine paramilitary murders in Northern Ireland over the past two years but two thirds of these cases are awaiting trial. So you could say the PSNI has caught up with UK standards of murder investigation and it is the rest of the criminal justice system that is the problem.

You could also say the PSNI has a harder task than colleagues in England and Wales. Non-paramilitary murderers are easier to catch, as they are typically a friend or relative of their victim. In Northern Ireland, the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) does not like to proceed without a high probability of success, unlike in England and Wales, where prosecutors will settle for a 50/50 chance. Paramilitary murder cases are heard before no-jury Diplock courts, which demand a uniquely high standard of proof.

All these factors might help explain a 19 per cent conviction rate - fewer than one murder in five solved - but it is noticeable that the PSNI does not encourage discussion of its performance in these terms.

Just obtaining the basic figure for Northern Ireland’s murder conviction rate is a lengthy chore. No official source publishes it. For this article, I have had to search for news reports on each individual death.

In its own statistics, the PSNI gives itself a “crime outcome rate” for homicide of 76 per cent this year, down from 95 per cent the year before.

However, that only means it got the paperwork off its desk, generally by passing it to the PPS, at which point the PSNI stops measuring how a case progresses - even though all the PPS is really doing is putting the police’s investigation before a judge.

It seems extraordinary, amid the blizzard of government statistics we are bombarded with, that no agency within or overseeing the criminal justice system thinks to produce the simple number connecting murders to convictions - surely the touchstone of the entire system’s purpose. Expecting every murderer to be locked up is hardly pandering to lock ‘em up populism.

There are on average just under 20 non-paramilitary homicides a year in Northern Ireland. The PSNI’s very high ‘outcome rate’ suggests it is effective at solving those killings, which would make the 19 per cent rate for paramilitary murders all the more noticeable, if it were being brought to our notice. But of course it is not. In the absence of straightforward statistics on this issue we tend to discuss the PSNI’s performance in terms of collusion.

This applies to recent paramilitary cases as much as to those dating back to the Troubles, as the definition of collusion has widened from active involvement in murder to passive failure to solve murder. It remains easy to imagine that failure applying in the approach to dangerous organisations riddled with informants.

Once suspicions of this nature are raised, public and political debate divides along traditional lines, then cancels out. Perhaps that is why the PSNI seems comfortable enough with it - and it is scarcely alone. From the Policing Board to the victims sector, everyone seems more interested in narratives than numbers. Yet while our narrative arguments may never be solved, the numbers reveal an incontestable truth: for all the resources and intelligence at its fingertips, for all the political and public support it commands, the PSNI still cannot solve four out of five paramilitary murders.

There may be a lot more to say on the subject but that is always the first thing that should be said - and the first point the PSNI should be required to justify.