Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags

In an interview, Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said the news on crime is good as well: a decline for six consecutive years. This year's rate is down nearly 14 percent from last year's. The walk of shame incident was the work of a small minority, he said. "There is a tiny group of people who are marginalized and stuck in the past. Like any cornered animal, they are lashing out. But are we going backwards? No."

Still, many people interviewed here in recent days said policing issues remain far more controversial than the statistics suggest, particularly in poor neighborhoods that suffered the worst violence from the 1960s to the 1990s.

While overt sectarian violence is increasingly rare, tensions are still high enough that officials built a new separation wall just weeks ago -- adding to the dozens of walls and fences, some of them brick, corrugated-metal and steel-mesh structures more than 25 feet high, that already separate Protestant and Catholic communities.

When a factory was built recently in a Catholic area just across the street from a Protestant neighborhood, almost no Protestants could bring themselves to walk those few feet across a historical dividing line to apply for work, said Frank McCoubrey, a Belfast City Council member and community worker.

Dissident Catholic paramilitary groups, opposed to making peace with Protestants, are suspected in the recent shooting deaths of two police officers. And a Hatfields-and-McCoys-style feud between two extended families in the Catholic Ballymurphy neighborhood has resulted in at least one killing and numerous homes being shot up and burned out in the past year.

Across the poorer, working-class sections of both communities, residents said they feel more threatened than ever by muggings, assaults and break-ins, much of the crime fueled by young drug abusers.

"There's people out there that have painted a pretty picture that things are all rosy in Northern Ireland, but they're not," said McCoubrey, who represents the Shankill area, the epicenter of Protestant paramilitary activity during the long unrest that is known here as the Troubles.

McCoubrey said that while police have vastly improved their performance in recent years, many people in the Shankill area have little faith in them. He said that police respond slowly to crime and that even persistent offenders rarely face more than a slap on the wrist from judges.

For decades, while police focused on counterinsurgency, Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups effectively enforced the law in their communities. People who stole cars or sold drugs would often be punished with a beating or a bullet in the knee.

McCoubrey said some frustrated people still call on former paramilitary fighters to seek justice, and they respond, despite their own pledges to support the police.

In August, residents of another Protestant community in Belfast punished a local drug dealer by tarring and feathering him and tying him to a lamppost wearing a sign that said, "I'm a drug-dealing scumbag."

Government officials paint a far more optimistic picture of policing and criminal justice, which is to pass from the control of London to local government officials this year. "I think huge progress has been made on policing, but we need to continue building trust," said Shaun Woodward, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, the top British government official in the province.

Liam Maskey, co-founder of Intercomm, a community development group that brings Protestants and Catholics together, said the people of Northern Ireland are being forced to learn the basics of the rule of law.

So when parking enforcement officers were sent out into the street for the first time last year, he said, people who got tickets sometimes responded by beating up the officers.

"Our job used to be to stop people getting killed on a daily basis," he said. "Now we're trying to set the groundwork for a whole new society."