It’s hard to believe it is twenty years since the PSNI was established.
Even harder to believe it’s twenty years since allowing my name to go forward as a member of the inaugural Policing Board.
Taking the decision to participate in the reform of policing was not an easy one and was made more difficult by continued loyalist and dissident threats and violence.
Watching your family home being turned into Fort Knox, with bullet proof doors and windows, security cameras and panic buttons, was a wake up call as to the seriousness of my decision.
Full credit is due to the spouses of those who joined the new structures.
Following a bruising encounter with some unreconstructed militant republicans, my late boss, Seamus Mallon, asked if I would consider applying for a personal firearm. I didn’t warm to the idea. There were already too many guns in Northern Ireland. Gun possession ran against my non violent principles.
The first policing board was a serious challenge to the actual implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Mallon used to say: “Solve policing and the politics will solve itself”.
Thankfully the stewardship of the board was entrusted to an unusual couplet - the sober, considered and calm academic, Professor Desmond Rea, and the pastoral, enigmatic and sage-like, Denis Bradley.
Despite their obvious differences in background, culture and approach this was a leadership team which worked well.
A horrific and cowardly attack on Denis Bradley in Derry not only demonstrated his bravery but also the risks involved in peace building.
An early mistake in the construction of the board was the appointment of too few women. The board certainly wasn’t as diverse or representative as it could have been. That said, those on the first board were determined to make it work.
My own history of engagement with the RUC was wholly negative. I feared them as a teenager. Like others, I was frequently humiliated with their policy of stop and search. As a parliamentary assistant, I suffered the indignity of making constituent complaints from the streets through the Sangers at RUC fortifications. And worst of all, whilst being attacked by a gang of loyalist thugs who tried to pull me from my car, two RUC police tenders with mobile support teams sat and watched the episode without intervening.
As the grandson of a War of Independence veteran who was court-martialled, imprisoned and then exiled from the north after the Treaty, I was now sitting and working alongside Alan Brooke, grandson of the unionist icon Basil Brooke. Basil who never wanted a Catholic about the place.
That first board was forged in adversity but bonded by sense of purpose. Human rights were put at the centre of policing for the first time. It was to become a police service - not a police force.
As usual with political developments Sinn Féin were slow to get on the bus. Their ambivalence would not slow down the implementation of the Patten reforms. Unionists could sulk about these reforms but they could not change them. The RUC was no longer.
Whilst he may never get the credit, Alex Attwood, the former SDLP MLA, was tenacious in ensuring the Patten proposals were implemented to the full. It certainly cost him in the popularity stakes as a politician.
Without diminishing the sacrifices of those members of the RUC who bravely lost their lives during the Troubles, the RUC was not fit for purpose. It was wholly unrepresentative of the community it sought to serve and that wasn’t sustainable.
Increasingly many good and decent RUC officers were continually undermined by colleagues who were institutionally sectarian and actively engaged in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. The rotten apples were rotting the barrel.
Reform of policing is ongoing but now the challenge is to remove the dead hand of stale politics and partisan politicians from controlling the PSNI.
Politicians owe that much to those who wear the uniform of the PSNI.
