25 February 1999 Edition
US Senator makes submission to Patten commission
by Ned Kelly
American Senator Tom Hayden, speaking to An Phoblacht shortly after the public launch of a submission to the Patten Commission compiled by a group of American policing experts, said that cosmetic changes in the composition of the Los Angeles police had failed to bring about reforms.
The report is based on the lessons of Los Angeles police reform following the serious breakdown in police-community relations that led to the explosions of violence in the city in 1965 and in 1992 following the acquittal of white policemen who were video taped savagely beating Afro-American Rodney King.
The submission came about following a meeting that Hayden, Merrick Bobb, Robert Garcia, Paul Hoffman, Constance Rice and John Van de Kamp, all experts on policing issues, had while the Patten Commission was on a fact-finding tour to the US in January.
Hayden stressed that merely altering the composition of the police would fail to address the more important underlying problems. He added that in Los Angeles many of the racial problems in society were being internalised and reproduced within the police force.
In a joint statement the American group listed key points that experience had taught them were crucial in developing new police-community relations.
They pointed to the need to ``sit down with a blank sheet of paper'' in order to ask `what is the ideal? What is the mission?' Such a starting point was vital as opposed to attempting ``to `fix' an entrenched, time-bound, tradition-orientated institution''.
They also pointed out the powerful and beneficial social effects that changes in the policing status quo could have. The difficulties of the RUC being controlled directly by the NIO and the transition from operating within a de facto war culture to a democratic and egalitarian ethos and institutions were also raised.
Their experience had taught them that it was a mistake to believe that accountability could be achieved without independent mechanisms of investigation and review, with disciplinary power. The role of empowered citizens in a democratic political process via local elections with strong powers of redress was important along with meaningful guarantees of due process and stringent protection against the abuse of power.
They pointed out that despite reform commissions, a stronger tradition of civilian authority and significant changes in the leadership and policy of the Los Angeles police and sheriffs departments, they had still fallen short of the twin goals that are also paramount to the successful creation of a new policing service in the Six Counties, that of an ``accountable policing service reflecting the multi-cultural society it serves'' and ``a police force operating with trust and confidence in communities where disadvantage, poverty and powerlessness continue to foster suspicion and rage''.
In a damning sentence the submission underlines what is at the heart of the problem with the RUC and other crown force organisations: ``The moral force of what ought to be is weakened by the collision with the reality of what `is'''
The internal `code of silence' operating within Los Angeles was also pointed out as a ``powerful deterrent to change'', where the culture emanating from the top down within the RUC of such a `code of silence' is even more apparent. Despite new proposals and support for them from the highest levels in American society following the Watt riots or uprisings of 1965, failures were ``due to lack of will to agree to implement agreed-upon reform proposals.''
The effects of affirmative action employment strategies developed in 1981 following a federal anti-discrimination settlement, the Blake case, are also analysed. Ten years after the positive discrimination action, the vast majority of women, African-Americans and Latinos remained in lower rung positions, including 82% of African-Americans in 1991. The submission states the difficulty in ``pouring new wine into old skins'' as a problem likely to be faced by a new policing service that fails to tackle the current culture of the RUC, let alone its current leadership who rose through the ranks during some of the worst RUC abuses of power and collusion with Loyalist death squads.
Following the Rodney King beating by LAPD officers in 1991 it was discreetly suggested that Chief Darryl Gates step down after 42 years with the LAPD.
Merrick Bobb, one of the submission's authors, was appointed by the county five years after the Christopher Commission into the violence that erupted after the Rodney King affair to examine the progress of reforms. Bobb stated that despite improvements reforms had not gone as far as was possible or required, and significantly that the `code of silence' persisted.
The issues the submission comes back to again and again - the use of force, the code of silence, and the lack of accountability - are lessons that the Patten Commission will now take forward into their blueprint for a new policing service for the Six Counties. Unless the mistakes from other parts of the world and truth about the actions and the culture of the RUC are part of that solution we may well find ourselves 35 years further down the line regretting the missed opportunity.
American Senator Tom Hayden, speaking to An Phoblacht shortly after the public launch of a submission to the Patten Commission compiled by a group of American policing experts, said that cosmetic changes in the composition of the Los Angeles police had failed to bring about reforms.
The report is based on the lessons of Los Angeles police reform following the serious breakdown in police-community relations that led to the explosions of violence in the city in 1965 and in 1992 following the acquittal of white policemen who were video taped savagely beating Afro-American Rodney King.
The submission came about following a meeting that Hayden, Merrick Bobb, Robert Garcia, Paul Hoffman, Constance Rice and John Van de Kamp, all experts on policing issues, had while the Patten Commission was on a fact-finding tour to the US in January.
Hayden stressed that merely altering the composition of the police would fail to address the more important underlying problems. He added that in Los Angeles many of the racial problems in society were being internalised and reproduced within the police force.
In a joint statement the American group listed key points that experience had taught them were crucial in developing new police-community relations.
They pointed to the need to ``sit down with a blank sheet of paper'' in order to ask `what is the ideal? What is the mission?' Such a starting point was vital as opposed to attempting ``to `fix' an entrenched, time-bound, tradition-orientated institution''.
They also pointed out the powerful and beneficial social effects that changes in the policing status quo could have. The difficulties of the RUC being controlled directly by the NIO and the transition from operating within a de facto war culture to a democratic and egalitarian ethos and institutions were also raised.
Their experience had taught them that it was a mistake to believe that accountability could be achieved without independent mechanisms of investigation and review, with disciplinary power. The role of empowered citizens in a democratic political process via local elections with strong powers of redress was important along with meaningful guarantees of due process and stringent protection against the abuse of power.
They pointed out that despite reform commissions, a stronger tradition of civilian authority and significant changes in the leadership and policy of the Los Angeles police and sheriffs departments, they had still fallen short of the twin goals that are also paramount to the successful creation of a new policing service in the Six Counties, that of an ``accountable policing service reflecting the multi-cultural society it serves'' and ``a police force operating with trust and confidence in communities where disadvantage, poverty and powerlessness continue to foster suspicion and rage''.
In a damning sentence the submission underlines what is at the heart of the problem with the RUC and other crown force organisations: ``The moral force of what ought to be is weakened by the collision with the reality of what `is'''
The internal `code of silence' operating within Los Angeles was also pointed out as a ``powerful deterrent to change'', where the culture emanating from the top down within the RUC of such a `code of silence' is even more apparent. Despite new proposals and support for them from the highest levels in American society following the Watt riots or uprisings of 1965, failures were ``due to lack of will to agree to implement agreed-upon reform proposals.''
The effects of affirmative action employment strategies developed in 1981 following a federal anti-discrimination settlement, the Blake case, are also analysed. Ten years after the positive discrimination action, the vast majority of women, African-Americans and Latinos remained in lower rung positions, including 82% of African-Americans in 1991. The submission states the difficulty in ``pouring new wine into old skins'' as a problem likely to be faced by a new policing service that fails to tackle the current culture of the RUC, let alone its current leadership who rose through the ranks during some of the worst RUC abuses of power and collusion with Loyalist death squads.
Following the Rodney King beating by LAPD officers in 1991 it was discreetly suggested that Chief Darryl Gates step down after 42 years with the LAPD.
Merrick Bobb, one of the submission's authors, was appointed by the county five years after the Christopher Commission into the violence that erupted after the Rodney King affair to examine the progress of reforms. Bobb stated that despite improvements reforms had not gone as far as was possible or required, and significantly that the `code of silence' persisted.
The issues the submission comes back to again and again - the use of force, the code of silence, and the lack of accountability - are lessons that the Patten Commission will now take forward into their blueprint for a new policing service for the Six Counties. Unless the mistakes from other parts of the world and truth about the actions and the culture of the RUC are part of that solution we may well find ourselves 35 years further down the line regretting the missed opportunity.