February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Anne Cadwallader
BELFAST — Northern Ireland’s Special Branch is still not sharing crucial information with detectives in other departments, according to the former New York police officer tasked with monitoring police reform.
The news is significant in that it indicates a continuing resistance from within the new Police Service of Northern Ireland to the Patten reforms.
Meanwhile, the acting chief constable of the PSNI, Colin Cramphorn, has ordered an investigation into alleged leaks from the Special Branch to journalists. The leaks are being blamed by senior British politicians on anti-Good Friday agreement police officers trying to damage the peace process.
The phone bills of several journalists and police officers are being examined by detectives to check who their contacts are. The move follows a meeting between John Reid, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, and Cramphorn, at which Reid complained that some leaks were politically motivated.
He is understood to have been particularly annoyed about a leak to the BBC of an alleged “IRA hit list” of senior British Conservative politicians, found in the aftermath of the Castlereagh break-in.
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The term “hit list” was “grossly exaggerated”, according to British security sources. They say the list was mainly taken from the biographies of former prime minister John Major and finance minister Norman Lamont and was an old document.
On reform of Special Branch, Tom Constantine, the oversight commissioner responsible for ensuring police reform in Northern Ireland, said there has been substantial progress, including the formation of the cross-community policing board, and recruitment on a 50-50 Protestant-Catholic basis.
But the former New York state police chief and former head of the U.S. Drugs Enforcement Agency, said restructuring the Special Branch was a key issue if violent and organized crime was to be effectively combated.
He said that although one person now heads the Special Branch and the Criminal Investigation Department, and Special Branch officers regularly briefed regional and district commanders, arrangements had not been put in place to share vital tactical information at a more basic level.
“For example, if two bodies turned up in a drug-related murder, crime branch might gather all the evidence they could, but it could be a Special Branch officer down the corridor has the vital piece of the jigsaw,” Constantine said.
“It does not appear there is a structural line for sharing information”, he said, recognizing the complex task Special Branch faces in trying to preserve the ability to combat terrorism but adding there was also a need to work more effectively with other parts of the force to combat crime.
The policy program, issued in January by the then chief constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, on reorganization of Special Branch and CID did not meet the oversight team’s requirements. Constantine has asked for a new plan by mid-May.
In his fourth report, he pointed out that the police service has as yet failed to finalize a comprehensive human rights plan. He also criticized the Garnerville training college in East Belfast as inadequate and outdated and has called for a new purpose-built college as soon as possible.
Unionists have defended the Special Branch’s anti-terrorism role, but Sinn Fein cites failure to get rid of it as one of its reasons for not joining the policing board, and it has long faced intense criticism from inside and outside police ranks.
Three candidates have now been short-listed to replace Sir Ronnie Flanagan as chief constable, with two already serving members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The third is at present a senior officer with the London’s Metropolitan Police.
The candidates are Alan McQuillan, Chris Albiston and Hugh Orde. McQuillan is the assistant chief constable for Belfast and has been in charge of policing the Holy Cross school loyalist protests and sectarian violence in north Belfast.
Albiston is also an assistant chief constable and has just returned to service in the North after secondment in Kosovo, leading the policing operations there.
The third candidate, Hugh Orde, has been heading the Stevens Inquiry, which is an investigation into allegations that members of the security forces in the North colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in the murder of the Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.