NORTH’S POLICE OMBUDSMAN ANNOUNCES DEPARTURE | THREE DAMNING REPORTS

Hutchinson to go in January

BY PEADAR WHELAN

POLICE OMBUDSMAN Al Hutchinson has finally bowed to the inevitable, announcing he will resign from office in January 2012.
Despite three damning reports and pressure from families of victims, campaign groups, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, Hutchinson had previously dug his heels in, insisting he would not relinquish his post until June 2012.
In one of the reports that fuelled calls for Hutchinson to go, independent human rights organisation Committee on the Administration of Justice raised concerns about the capacity of the Police Ombudsman’s office to investigate historic cases and questioned the quality of the reports it published.
Recent revelations over his conduct within the office and accusations that he showed a lack of leadership forced the Canadian policeman’s hand.
On Tuesday 25th October, the BBC Spotlight programme interviewed Sam Pollock, Chief Executive of the Ombudsman’s Office, who resigned in April saying he had lost confidence in Hutchinson.
One of the issues that prompted Pollock’s decision was Hutchinson’s failure to investigate the RUC’s handling of their agent codenamed ‘Stakeknife’.
Then PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde asked Hutchinson to investigate the RUC’s use of Stakeknife, alleged to be west Belfast republican Freddie Scappaticci. Despite this request, no action was taken.
It has also emerged that Hutchinson gave misleading evidence to the Stormont Justice Committee. According to Sinn Féin Justice spokesperson Raymond McCartney, when Hutchinson met the Justice Committee in September he gave evidence that was “misleading and factually incorrect”.
McCartney said that Hutchinson’s claims that his office’s proposals for dealing with the past had already received positive acknowledgment from the Criminal Justice Inspectorate are “not true”.
In the aftermath of Sam Pollock’s resignation, the Criminal Justice Inspectorate carried out its own investigation into the Police Ombudsman’s office and concluded that the independence of the Ombudsman’s office had been lowered by the nature of its conduct regarding historical cases.
It also highlighted concerns over the handling of sensitive material and the divisions within senior management.
In a separate development, a Sinn Féin delegation, including Policing spokesperson Gerry Kelly and Raymond McCartney, met with the Criminal Justice Inspectorate on Thursday 20th October. According to Kelly, the meeting “clarified that the claim made by the Police Ombudsman concerning his proposals for dealing with the past has not in fact been acknowledged or endorsed at this time by the Criminal Justice Inspectorate”.
Kelly also outlined Sinn Féin’s position on the Police Ombudsman’s office.
“We want to see the Police Ombudsman’s office return to being an independent, effective and credible mechanism for holding the police to account.
“The Ombudsman’s office is a powerful and critical accountability mechanism in the new policing arrangements but those powers were misused, suffered from interference and were contaminated. There are already a number of recommendations made by Nuala O’Loan which could be used to strengthen the independence and credibility of the office.”
It has also emerged that the reporting on as many as seven investigations has been suspended after questions were raised about the independence of the initial investigations.
At the heart of the Police Ombudsman’s failures is the unwillingness to tackle head-on the issue of collusion between the British state forces and loyalist gangs, effectively letting the RUC in particular off the hook.
In two reports — into the 1971 McGurk’s Bar bombing and the 1994 Loughinisland massacre — Hutchinson never used the word collusion, leading solicitor Niall Murphy to rubbish the Loughinisland report.
According to the Committee on the Administration of Justice, the Police Ombudsman has no clear definition or application of the term collusion, which leads to the belief that the Police Ombudsman’s office is restricted from making a proactive finding that the police have collaborated in the past with loyalist death squads even in circumstances where the evidence points to the inevitable conclusion that there was collusion.