The vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board Denis Bradley has urged that the 50:50 recruitment policy in the Police Service of Northern Ireland be ended only when a target for Catholic recruitment has been reached.
This policy requires that 50 per cent of recruits taken in to the PSNI must be Catholic with the remainder being of other religions.
In an address to the SDLP annual conference on Saturday, Mr Bradley said that although he supported the policy, the requirement was not based on proper human rights grounds.
He said the Patten report on policing in Northern Ireland had recommended that recruitment "be let float free" once the number of Catholics in the force had reached 30 per cent.
"When unionist people say we do not like the 50:50 recruitment, we can say neither do we. It is not right and will not be right into the future." The principle that there had to be five of them for five of us was not a human rights one.
He said the SDLP should not be worried about the IRA or loyalists taking over policing within working-class communities. Although they might seek to do so they would not succeed.
Mr Bradley said that the PSNI now felt that the "monkey of history had been taken off its back" and that policing in Northern Ireland was now much more professional and authoritative.
However, he warned that policing had to be embedded in a culture and framework of human rights.
There was a danger of human rights being seen as something nice to have but which could "go out the window on a hard day". Some police officers might say that human rights were "grand" but that they were only there for the visuals. "If we let that happen we will have made the biggest blunder we could make."
Mr Bradley also expressed concern that many police officers were not living or socialising in the communities they served. There were no police officers living within 10 miles of Derry.
He acknowledged that there were some problems over security. However, there was also an economic factor; when people were paid well, they tended to move out to other areas.
Mr Bradley said the next big challenge would be to embed policing within the community. The police needed to bond with the community and the community needed to bond with the police. This was unlikely to happen if officers lived 10 miles away from where they policed and never went back to socialise or bring their children to school.
Mr Bradley said that while he believed that the restorative justice issue "would sort itself out", he was concerned about community safety being separated from policing.
He said there was a growing bureaucracy in the Northern Ireland Office dealing with community safety and that this could see the policing board left with a reduced role in the areas of monitoring and oversight of policing.
