Policing and Peace in Northern Ireland: Change, Conflict and Community Confidence

The history and experience of policing in Northern Ireland has long been a contested and dangerous enterprise, inextricably linked to its political, social and civil context (Murphy, 2013, Mulcachy, 2006). This chapter sets out that context from the foundation of the RUC in 1922 through the violent confrontations of the Troubles, the Patten Commission’s ‘New Start to Policing’ in 1999 (ICPNI, 1999) and the establishment of the PSNI’s in 2001. At a time when the case of security sector reform in Northern Ireland continues to be held up as a ‘blueprint’ for such reforms elsewhere (Ellison, 2010, Doyle, 2010, Sinclair, 2012), it explores the organisation’s recent struggles with identity, composition and impartiality and the organisational responses to both internal dissent and external instability. It concludes with some reflections of the future of the PSNI in a Northern Ireland largely beyond violence, but not yet at peace.