600 police to go back on streets
At least 600 desk-bound officers are to be moved back on to the streets as part of urgent new plans by Chief Constable Matt Baggott to re-organise his police service.
His senior management team is carrying out a post-by-post review in advance of transferring more officers away from office duties.
The overwhelming majority of those being shifted to the front line will come from the rank and file, but the positions of other officers up to Chief Superintendent level are to be scrutinised as well.
The Chief Constable who took over just six weeks ago has already briefed his Policing Board of the plans which he believes will be cost efficient, and a major initiative to increase public confidence in the ability to tackle crime and quicken the pace of the criminal justice process.
He expects some resistance to the changes, but in the immediate aftermath of a hugely significant security operation which foiled a dissident republican attempt on the life of one of his men in Co Fermanagh at the weekend, the Chief Constable said:
“I expect it’ll be a bit messy because it hasn’t been done before. But sometimes you have to grasp nettles, and if I don’t grasp this nettle now it will be more difficult to grasp in the future.”
Even though the phasing out of the PSNI’s remaining 440 full-time reserve officers by March 2011 will go ahead, Mr Baggott is keen to strengthen his resources on the ground by next summer enabling them to work with local communities and to be free of all office paper work.
District commanders have been asked to justify the role of every desk-bound officer by January and many of those to be re-deployed will be replaced by civilian staff to run a much more streamlined case management process.
He said he was shocked by the amount of bureaucracy in the legal system. Much of it, he believes, could be done away with the introduction of more fixed penalties and cautions for low level crime.
Meanwhile two of the five men arrested when police thwarted an attempt to murder a Catholic recruit in his home village of Garrison, Co. Fermanagh on Saturday night are still being questioned.
Three others have been released without charge, one of them in the Republic where he was detained by gardai in Rossinver, Co Leitrim.
But security chiefs believe they have made a massive breakthrough in their investigations into the activities of dissident republicans in a part of the country where the terrorist threat had been at an all-time high.
