Transforming Policing or Reforming Police: The Northern.

This paper considers the imperative of transforming policing rather than reforming police institutions in societies emerging from violent conflict. Through the prism of the Northern Ireland experience following the report of the international independent commission on policing (the Patten Commission) in 1999, the paper deconstructs the transition rhetoric which posits all visible change as necessarily a good thing, and points to a range of factors which inhibit vital progress in ushering in the era of human rights compliance: among these, the tendency of the old guard, through maintenance of control of the change process, to continue to privilege a state-centric narrative of both the conflict itself and to narrowly define appropriate policing solutions. The paper explores the futility of attempts to build for the future which do not fully countenance the legacy of the past and suggests that a continued failure to meet the human rights challenge offered to policing, succeeds only in undermining aspects of the broader projects of peacebuilding and societal regeneration. The paper concludes by drawing together a number of issues requiring consideration by any society embarking on a process of institutional reform of policing, which is intended to be truly transformative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]