The country’s ‘blue lights’ cops check for bombs under their family cars and never sit with their backs to a door. Now a calamitous data breach has made life even more dangerous, they tell Laura Hackett.
Patrick is recalling the day, 20 years ago, that he received his acceptance letter from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). “One of my friends got married that morning and I spent the whole day at the wedding with all my friends.” He remembers thinking, “Next week this is all going to be in the past. You’re never going to have another big wedding like this with all the boys there.”
Patrick had a Roman Catholic upbringing. He’d grown up in a republican area where his neighbours, extended family and friends believed in a united Ireland. From their perspective the police were not there to help citizens or maintain law and order; they were, as Patrick puts it, “crown forces in occupied Ireland”. Patrick saw things differently. The structure of a career in policing, the sense of adventure and the idea of doing something worthwhile attracted him. “I had always said growing up that if I’d lived anywhere but Northern Ireland I would have been a soldier or a police officer. It was just in me.”
After the Good Friday agreement of 1998 most of the violence of the Troubles seemed to have stopped. Slowly but surely, hardened mindsets were softening. Patrick hoped that soon his community would accept the police as a legitimate service. “I was under no illusion. It was going to be a long process but I thought if I don’t do it, who will?” So he applied to join the PSNI. “I knew what I was going to be giving up — the majority of my friends, playing Gaelic football and hurling, the social life I had. I was even giving up the town where I grew up. But I thought it was worth it.”
Patrick’s parents accepted his decision, albeit after a short cooling-off period. Other relatives were less tolerant: one uncle didn’t speak to him for four years. He has never been back to the pub where he spent “half my waking life” as a young man. He had to move out of his town practically overnight.
In the subsequent two decades Northern Ireland has changed beyond recognition, but police officers here still operate under very different circumstances to those in the rest of the UK. That’s not because crime in general is worse: last year in Northern Ireland there were 58 crimes per 1,000 people, compared with 100 in London and 130 in Manchester. No, it’s because there is a small but dedicated group of people — dissident republicans — who want to kill police officers.
Blue Lights, a BBC drama broadcast earlier this year, shone a light on this problem, but it came after a real-life reminder of the dangers of the job. On February 22 John Caldwell, a detective chief inspector from Omagh, Co Tyrone, was shot several times in front of his young son while off duty. Caldwell was loading footballs into the boot of his car after coaching a youth team. He survived but with life-changing injuries. In July three men were charged in connection with the shooting. It made the public aware of what Patrick has always known: there are people out there looking for any opportunity to attack him.
Now the risks have become even worse. In August there was a calamitous data leak of the names of police officers and staff. The information remained online for just under two and a half hours before it was taken down, having been reported to Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd by someone within the organisation (the details here are fuzzy, despite intense questioning of Todd at the Northern Ireland affairs committee last month). Todd did reveal that the data is in the hands of dissident republicans, and that at the time of speaking the PSNI had made six arrests and charged one person for possession of the information.
To his dismay Patrick discovered that his details were part of the leak — and, worse, they could be traced to his mother’s address.
Patrick loved the PSNI when he first joined. He admits the strict discipline was a culture shock: “There were grown men roaring at you about not polishing your boots right. I was, like, ‘Jesus, what the f*** is this?’ " But there was a real sense of camaraderie. “As long as your colleagues trusted you with their life, there weren’t going to be any problems.”
Like all officers, Patrick has always had a stringent personal security regime, including checking under his car every morning for booby traps. Just a few days before I spoke to him he had driven his daughter to school for the first day of the new school year and she had asked why he was looking under the car. Now that she was in her early teens, Patrick decided it was time to tell her the truth: “I’m making sure no one’s put a bomb under it.” “But you told me before you were checking for cats!” she said. (The cat fallacy was repeated by every officer I spoke to. One even joked that “Northern Ireland is the safest place in the world to be a cat.”)
Patrick, like most officers, brings his gun home every night after work. He even takes it to his golf club, hidden at the bottom of the bag. “I have all the club’s weak spots mapped out in my head, anywhere people can access the course and get away.”
He changes routes to and from work and school. Once you have a set routine, he explains, it is much easier to be targeted. This affects his social life too. “If someone asks me out for dinner, say, I’ll wait until two or three days before the event before I agree to it.” Once he arrives at a bar or restaurant, even on holiday, “I’ll find somewhere to sit near a door, where my back’s against the wall and I can see everyone. I absolutely hate having my back to a door. I wouldn’t settle.” His leg jiggles and he shifts in his seat.
He doesn’t just have himself to think about, his family could be targeted too. When he visits his mother he never stays for more than an hour, and never at the same time of day. If a terrorist realised he visited every Sunday at three o’clock for a roast dinner, he explains, that makes him an easy target. “I don’t want to bring my mum’s address under notice.”
Patrick has been taking these precautions for 20 years, to the point that they have become automatic. They were going to keep him safe, senior management assured him — that is until, “with one keystroke”, his details were made public.
On August 8 the PSNI had published a response to a freedom of information request. It had asked only for the number of officers in each rank within the organisation, but the spreadsheet containing this information also inadvertently revealed the details of every serving officer and member of staff. Those details included surnames, initials, their station, rank and number.
This might not sound too threatening, but if you have an unusual surname or live in a rural area it is very easy for someone to find your address from an online directory. In fact this may already be happening. Christopher O’Kane, an IT expert from Co Londonderry, was arrested in August and accused of searching for the home addresses of officers whose details were leaked. He is said to have highlighted the names of senior officers on the spreadsheet. O’Kane has since been granted bail.
Dr William Matchett, a former detective inspector in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and PSNI, and author of Secret Victory: The Intelligence War That Beat the IRA, explains that those most at risk were Catholic officers such as Patrick and officers who work in intelligence. He describes this latter group as the “juiciest target” for terrorists. “Even loyalists who didn’t consider cops legitimate targets, they did for anyone who was in intelligence.”
Organised crime gangs — which are plaguing Ireland, particularly Dublin — may also be interested in the information. Matchett says they could use it to blackmail officers or even target their children. There are international concerns too. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that Moscow will be interested in this list,” Matchett says. “Ireland was always a back door into the UK for Russia. If something as primitive as the New IRA has the data, then the Kremlin has it too.”
Out of the 10,000-odd officers and staff whose details were leaked, 3,954 were referred to an emergency threat assessment group and categorised as green, yellow or, for the most at risk, red. There were 857 in the red category. Some of those people are considering moving house or to another police station. As of September 5, just one person had resigned citing the data breach, according to Todd. But as officers are required to give several weeks’ notice, this number is likely to have grown. Todd also said that 54 people who are currently off sick have identified the data breach as a factor. There are probably many more. Liam Kelly, the head of the Police Federation (the closest thing the PSNI has to a trade union), said that in the week after the leak sickness levels jumped from an average of about 400 officers off every week to 800.
Internal and independent investigations are being carried out — not least because the PSNI has had two other data breaches this summer. On July 6 a laptop, radio and documents were stolen from a car, including spreadsheets with the names of more than 200 officers and staff. Then, on August 17, an officer put their notebook and laptop on top of their car and drove off. Both fell off on a motorway and sections of the notebook were lost containing details of 42 officers and staff. Simon Hoare, chairing the Northern Ireland affairs committee, likened the debacle to a Mr Bean sketch.
It was no laughing matter for Patrick when he typed his surname and initial into an online directory and found them linked to his old address — his mother’s house. Twenty years of missing Sunday roasts have gone down the drain. He has since got the information taken down and has explained the situation to his mother.
Patrick is angry with senior management. “If I lost one page out of my notebook I’d be in deep shit, even if there was nothing on it. They’ve lost the names of 10,000-odd police officers and staff.” But anger at the PSNI’s leadership goes far beyond Patrick and far beyond the data breach. It has its roots in the Good Friday agreement.
The wording of the 1998 accords showed commitment to “a new beginning to policing in Northern Ireland” by developing a police service more representative of the population as a whole — “and which, in a peaceful environment, should be routinely unarmed”.
This was a far cry from the RUC, the police force formed in 1922 following the partition of Ireland, a successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary. The RUC was vehemently unionist in its make-up. It did not represent Catholics, who felt unduly targeted by its officers early on in the Troubles when anyone suspected of IRA links could be imprisoned without trial. Of the almost two thousand people jailed during “the internments”, only about a hundred were loyalists. By 1996 only 7 per cent of RUC officers were Catholic.
The RUC was a toxic brand. Lord Patten, fresh from governing Hong Kong, was given the task of carrying out an independent commission on policing. The Patten report recommended that the RUC be renamed the PSNI, with the introduction of a 50-50 recruitment policy for Protestants and Catholics. It also suggested the creation of a new policing board, ideally composed of politicians from all sides, to supervise police activities.
In November 2001 a new era of policing began. In its almost 22 years of existence the PSNI has made good progress on many of Patten’s aims. In 2007 Sinn Fein finally announced its support for the police force (previously it did not recognise the organisation as legitimate) and joined the board. Catholics now make up about a third of the PSNI; women also make up roughly a third. The number of officers has also been drastically reduced, from 13,000 to about 6,700. And even though the attack on John Caldwell, as well as the murders of Stephen Carroll and Ronan Kerr, two Catholic police officers, in 2009 and 2011 respectively, have left deep scars on the service, it is worth remembering that more officers were killed in a single day of the Troubles (in a mortar bomb attack in Newry in 1985) than in the entire lifespan of the PSNI.
Where the PSNI has been less successful is in gaining support from all neighbourhoods. There are, despite official claims to the contrary, still no-go areas, places where police can enter only with extensive back-up, and which effectively govern themselves. Efforts to reach out — to republicans or loyalists — can at times make policing less effective. Patrick tells me that senior officers warn local community workers before coming into an area to perform a search. This removes the element of surprise. Patrick tells me: “I remember going to a briefing for a search, and at the end a senior officer got up and said, ‘By the way, we’ve done a lot of work in this area this past couple of years, I don’t want you lot going in and messing it up.’ I remember thinking, you f***ing cheeky bastard, what do you think we are? A bunch of Neanderthals running about and making people’s lives a misery?”
However, there was one event above all others that undermined the faith of junior officers in senior management: the Ormeau Road incident of February 5, 2021. A year into the pandemic a gathering took place in south Belfast in breach of lockdown restrictions. It was held to commemorate those killed and wounded on the Ormeau Road in February 1992 when loyalist gunmen opened fire inside a bookmakers, killing five people and wounding nine. Thirty people had turned up to lay wreaths.
Two young police officers, recent recruits, spotted the gathering. Once the memorial service was over, they approached the organiser and encouraged people to disperse. One man who had been shot and injured in the 1992 massacre was detained on suspicion of disorderly behaviour and later released without charge. The incident caused a huge outpouring of anger from the nationalist community, including Sinn Fein.
The young officers were punished: one suspended and the other repositioned. But they applied for a judicial review and on August 29 Mr Justice Scoffield ruled that they had been unlawfully disciplined. The judge concluded that PSNI’s suspension of the first officer came “because of the threat (whether real or perceived) that, if it did not do so, republican support for policing would be withdrawn”. Gerry Kelly, Sinn Fein’s police spokesman, has denied the threat was made, but the chief constable has been forced to step down. He may appeal the judge’s decision.
“It didn’t really surprise me the way they treated those young fellas,” one police officer, Jenny, tells me, about the Ormeau Road incident. “I don’t think our organisation is very good at supporting officers. They’re better at supporting politicians and giving them what they want.”
Jenny joined the police force 15 years ago, following a career as a nurse. She is from a Catholic background but describes herself as nonreligious. Of all the officers I spoke to she initially seemed the most relaxed. She is part of a newer wave of police recruits who joined well after the Good Friday agreement and had no issues with telling all her family and friends what she did. She was not even that worried about her name being leaked in the data breach. But when I ask her about checking under her car, she chokes up — surprising me, but also, I think, herself. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just think that’s a horror. I have a child so I have to check every day.”
Like many officers Jenny spends much of her life trying not to think about the dangers of her job. Early in her policing career she had been involved in an incident in which she had to use her firearm in a public place. She was supported by senior management: “I wasn’t repositioned or put under investigation and I was back to work pretty quickly.” From her perspective what happened at Ormeau Road highlights what has gone wrong in the PSNI since.
Another officer, Adam, wasn’t the least surprised by what happened because it had happened to him too. Adam grew up in a Protestant police family. He reminisces about his father dropping into the house with his colleagues during a shift to get a cup of tea, casually leaning his machinegun against the kitchen cupboards. As long as he can remember Adam wanted to be a police officer too, even though he understood the risks better than most. At one point the whole family had to be moved overnight into police accommodation because an IRA gun team had been waiting at the end of their lane to murder his father. “I remember seeing him opening the door with his gun behind his back as he spoke to whoever was at the door,” Adam says. Even drying his green police uniform was a struggle — it couldn’t be hung out on the washing line in case someone spotted it.
As soon as Adam left school in the early 1990s he signed up to the RUC and was sent to an area renowned for republican terrorism. He tells me he still gets nervous among crowds, after years of having bricks and petrol bombs thrown at him. Even when he brought his young children to Disneyland, he says, “it took me a wee while to adjust — to realise that Tigger jumping out from behind a wall wasn’t going to do me any harm!” But he insists that, despite the threats, he has always loved being a police officer.
Four years ago, however, his devotion to the job was tarnished. Adam was dealing with a public order scenario, facing a hostile crowd. One man was allegedly injured by another officer, who is facing charges for the incident. Adam tells me that Sinn Fein made a call for officers to be suspended. Shortly afterwards he was told he would be removed from his role and repositioned to an administrative position. To him this was a punishment. He was told it was done in order to restore public confidence in policing. But that didn’t make sense to Adam. “The public were not complaining about our actions,” he says. “It was certain local politicians who were applying pressure to senior officers. Reluctantly I had to leave my station for six months.”
For Adam those six months were distressing. It affected his wife’s nursing shifts and their childcare arrangements. He was told that he was not to be given any overtime, which affected his earnings. He also had to leave the department he had thrived in to do administrative work — not his strong suit, he admits. He attempted to fight the decision, only to be told that there is no right to an appeal process when you are repositioned. It’s technically not a punishment, but Adam says that it comes with “a certain stigma and a suspicion”. He had to perform menial tasks with other officers also on “the naughty step”. The group was known as “the dirty dozen”.
On his solicitor’s advice Adam threatened legal action. Under pressure senior management returned him to his station without explanation or apology.
Following this incident Adam felt “bitterness, if not a degree of hatred, towards senior management — a distrust. You felt very much that one day they could be commending you and the next they’d throw you under the bus.”
The prevailing mood within the PSNI is one of low morale, fear and distrust of senior officers. “No one wants to work,” Jenny tells me. “You go out and do what you have to do but it’s half-hearted.”
Patrick says that he is “just trying to mark time until retirement — that’s the truth. A lot of the interest I had in the job is gone. I’ll do what I’m paid to do and nothing more.”
Money is becoming an issue too. A constable joining the RUC in 1990 would have received a salary of £12,456 ($25,470) in their first year, worth over £36,000 ($73,600) today, not counting their housing allowance or any overtime pay. A constable joining the PSNI this year would receive £30,348 ($62,000) — and no housing allowance. Pensions have changed too. One retired officer I spoke to said that his pension was worth at least 50 per cent of his monthly full-time pay. Now many officers who signed up under a plummy deal have been told they can no longer expect the payments they were promised.
The PSNI is suffering from an annual budget deficit of £50 million ($102 million). With no budget to recruit new officers, the PSNI is almost a thousand officers below the recommended number. And the data breach will only make things worse — it is expected to cost at least £240 million ($490 million).
While I was speaking to one officer, they received a text to say they were needed to carry out a search the following day in the Creggan area of Londonderry — a neighbourhood that was once a no-go zone and which is still hostile to the police. The search uncovered cash, handguns, grenades, ammunition and plastic explosives. I was told that the search team were ordered to enter the area without sufficient back-up: Land Rovers and machineguns aren’t great for optics. When things turned sour additional public order support was needed urgently — but the team were hours away. In the waiting period officers were attacked with petrol bombs, rocks and masonry. Sixteen officers were injured and some had to be taken to hospital. Rumours have been circulating since of an impending vote of no confidence in senior management in Londonderry and Strabane, although Liam Kelly, the head of the Police Federation, has denied this is on the cards.
The PSNI has not faced a crisis of this magnitude in its history. Some officers even believe that its collapse is necessary. With a bitter edge to his voice, Patrick tells me: “They need to take the PSNI and scrap it — just rebuild it from the start.” Other officers are more optimistic, saying the crisis could be a watershed moment for the police.
What can be done? Officers and senior management are united in their belief that greater investment is needed, but that is made difficult by the fact there is still no devolved government sitting in Stormont. For now Westminster will need to step in. Junior officers claim that senior management needs to be completely replaced and the policing board re-examined. They say there is just too much political interference — and not just from Sinn Fein. The DUP is notorious for pressuring senior management, for example regarding Orange Order parade routes during their Twelfth of July celebrations.
Discipline policies also need to be updated, officers claim. “They don’t investigate first and then punish,” Jenny says. “It’s not the way we’re told to do it in our investigations!”
All three of the officers I spoke to are parents. Only Adam said he’d encourage his children to join the force. Despite the repositioning incident, he remains proud of the organisation. “On the day I die,” he says, “and someday I will, the RUC crest and the PSNI crest will both be on my headstone. I’ve been proud to serve in both.”
Northern Ireland is like nowhere else on earth. Those born there, like myself, often feel a fierce loyalty to the country, while recognising its strange and complex problems. Being a police officer in Northern Ireland is even more strange and complex, both one of the most dangerous jobs you can do, while also one of the most contentious, even reviled. That garners an intense loyalty and camaraderie among those who take up the green uniform. But will loyalty be enough to keep it from falling apart?
The names of the three police officers have been changed.
Written by: Laura Hackett
© The Times of London