Liam Kelly

Police Federation NI chair Liam Kelly at the federation's annual conference 2024

Transcript

00:00 Liam, can I just ask you for your thoughts on how far you think we've strayed from the

00:04 new beginning of policing promised by the Patton Report?

00:07 I mean in 1999 Chris Patton mentioned about transforming the PSNI as a new service with

00:14 what it would be with community policing being embedded right across our society.

00:18 Seven and a half thousand officers who would be supported by a number of part-time colleagues

00:22 as well.

00:23 The reality of what we see 26 years on is our officer numbers are decimated.

00:28 We're now sitting at 6,379.

00:33 Community policing is in name only because our neighbourhood officers are now being asked

00:37 to do response calls and not doing the problem solving and actually the vision of community

00:42 policing as it is.

00:43 So I think our communities in some way have been let down very badly by our governments

00:48 in not supporting the PSNI to become the organisation that Chris Patton had envisaged.

00:53 In a six-time environment, 26 years on, we are still blighted by terrorism and unfortunately

00:58 our numbers need to reflect us having the ability to actually deal with those people.

01:03 So we have a report from our Chief Constable about our numbers being around 8,500.

01:09 So we're almost 2,000 officers short in what that is.

01:12 And finally around the Patton Report, the Chief Constable mentioned this morning that

01:15 he is in conversations with the actual original Patton team and asking them to do a health

01:20 check on what they think their vision initially was and what it looks like 26 years on.

01:25 And I don't think it will make comfortable reading for our communities because the reality

01:30 around it is, as I say, I think we've been badly let down.