W2B-012 Community - Policing-1.txt
Fear and loathing on the Falls Road Malachi O'Doherty

When a pregnant woman was viciously raped on the Falls Road recently, the area recoiled with shock. The following afternoon, a woman in a taxi office told the story of what had happened.
"They reckon they 'll get him fairly quickly," she said. "Who will get him?" I asked her. She paused before answering, making it clear who 'they' really were. "The police," she said, preferring to be discreet.
That night the Royal Ulster Constabulary said it was getting a very helpful response to its inquiries. On the Falls this statement, which would have been perfectly normal anywhere else, sounded like propaganda: if people were co-operating with the police, and the police with the people, then that - to the cynical eye - was something new. The hearts-and-minds work, particularly among women, that it takes to catch a rapist in a ghetto isn't easy where police must move in armed clusters.

On that same night, 'they', the other police force, went round the clubs and bars looking for the rapist. A man who had been drinking in one club said: "It was just like a police raid. They came in and everybody went quiet. Nobody mentioned it, but they walked round all the tables looking everyone in the face."

Whatever people on the Falls Road want in terms of criminal investigation and punishment, what they expect is for the IRA to be the most prominent policing agency.

And, whatever social attitudes surveys and police figures say about support for the police among northern Catholics, the feeling in the prime ghetto areas is still that the police are alien and dangerous - a feeling not confined to supporters of the IRA. There is evidence of intense exasperation among people who want normal policing, and who have broken with the prevailing political culture to demand it.

I stood out on the Falls Road for an hour one night just after the rape and I asked people going by if they thought there was a lot of crime there. Most of the answers were from men; women wouldn't speak to me. It was no way a scientific poll, but after about 20 interviews three divergent answers were clearly recurring. 'No. There isn't much crime here at all,' said some.

'Yes,' said others, 'there's a lot of crime. Muggings, joyriding and drugs.' 'Does anyone do anything about it?' 'Yes, the IRA does.'

The third response, as common as the second was: 'Yes, there's a lot of crime. There's bombings and knee-cappings and robberies.' 'Does anyone do anything about it?' 'No.'

It is not simply that the police neglect the area and that people generally turn to Sinn F&/ein. There are a lot of people on the Falls, it seems, who will tell a stranger if asked how much they detest the IRA. Many of these same people accuse the police, too, of abusing the area.

Last month, on the day after Const Allen Moore shot dead three people in the Sinn F&/ein office - as much a police station to many people as an advice centre - Senior Asst Chief Const William McAllister told journalists that he trusted that the sensible people of the Falls would understand what had happened, would see it as an isolated incident and would not let it dent their faith in the RUC left to be dented.

A senior social worker told me that he had been in community group meetings where one person had wept with shame at having reported thefts of property to Sinn F&/ein. "I know," he said "that if I saw a car being stolen out there on the street and called the police they probably wouldn't come for hour. People go to the ones who get results."

Charlie Bonner is a haulier from the wealthier part of upper Andersonstown. His son is a joyrider. Charlie has scars on his hands from injuries he received trying to grapple his son out of a moving car. He walked the streets at night looking for his boy. "Between the Provos and the police," he said, "no-one was any use to me."

Mr Bonner's son has a limp from a past knee-capping. He says he has tried to be reasonable with both the police and the Provos - to come to an arrangement that would help his reckless son, and not simply expose him to violence and abuse. Several times in past weeks he has been to court to see his son remanded in custody. Each time he has been offered bail. He has repeatedly refused it because his son is under an 'exclusion order' from the IRA and it isn't safe to bring him home.

If that sounds like the IRA extending its policing role to indirectly confining people in state institutions, Brendan...from Ardoyne in north Belfast has a much clearer case of the same kind of thing. He was told by Sinn F&/ein to have his two sons aged 12 and 15 put in care. He achieved this by having social service apply for a place of safety order. The boys were sent to St Patrick's training school where they met other boys on similar sentences.

The order on Brendan's sons was for a full year. He asked the north Belfast Sinn F&/ein councillor Joe Austin to help him get his boys back. Mr Austin visited the boys in St Patrick's and interviewed them there. He then told Brendan that the threat would be lifted - for weekends only. St Patrick's accepted this and allowed the boys home. After Christmas, Brendan's sons were given permission by Sinn F&/ein, mediated via Mr Austin, to stay home full-time. So sentence was passed and commuted from inside the Sinn F&/ein advice centre in Brompton Park.

"Sinn F&/ein sentenced your sons to a training school, then gave them time off for good behaviour," I said to Brendan. "Isn't that amazing?" "Yes"," he said. "But someone has to do something about delinquents here." Mr Austin confirmed most of the details.

There never has been 'normal' policing, whatever that is, in west Belfast. It is 'counter-terrorism' that debases police work now. It is naked physical danger that has turned police stations into fortresses, but there is no precedent of acceptable community policing by the RUC to which west Belfast could return.

The most common complaint about the handling of crime by the RUC is that it is more interested in recruiting informants than in stopping joyriding and theft.

The Brian Nelson informer case (Fortnight 303) might be the most dramatic case of undercover counter-insurgency. Few on the Falls believe the otherwise broadly accepted view that Mr Nelson's job was to undermine loyalist paramilitaries from inside and save lives. From the Catholic ghettoes it looked simply like a plot to kill republicans.

The controversial element of the case - that the normal working of the law has to be waived for intelligence-gathering - was not a revelation to people who believe they live among hundreds of small-time informers who are absolved of petty crime in return for services to the police. There is a huge amount of evidence that young 'hoods' are recruited to watch Sinn F&/ein members and report on their movements.

The chief body of evidence is the accumulated newspaper files of 'outings'. An 'outing' for an informer is his life-saver. He - it is usually he - declares publicly that he has been recruited by the police and gives details of how this was done, often through a press conference organised by Sinn F&/ein. A scan of the files of disclosures by informers in cuttings from <&Irish> An Phoblacht

of the Irish News suggests that many young people are pressurised into this kind of work, by a combination of bribes, threats and offers of charges against them being dropped.
