The proposed changes in name, ethos and culture of the RUC are essential to ensure the support of the entire community for the new police service, according to Mr Patten.
The commission recommends that the new force be called the Northern Ireland Police Service. It says the new service should adopt a new badge and symbols free of any association, British or Irish, and no longer fly the Union flag from its buildings. While retaining its current dark green uniform, the new force's priority will be to maintain a "neutral working environment".
Mr Patten said he was very conscious of the great impact the commission's recommendations would have on police culture. They would help to create a "more open, more accountable, less hierarchical and more modern organisation", which would be more integrated with the community it served. This would be achieved by streamlining management, "civilianising" the organisation, and making the force more representative of all sectors of the population. But for such a transformation to occur, symbols needed to match the substance of that transformation. "Our aim is to take the politics out of policing and we cannot do that if the symbols of policing are themselves political statements, or seen as such by a substantial section of the community," he added. That was why the commission was proposing a neutral name - The Northern Ireland Police Service - and new symbols to match, Mr Patten said. There was, however, no reason why the colour of the uniform could be seen as a political statement. It was, therefore, to be retained, although the cut of the uniform would be updated, at the request of the police.
He rejected claims that a name change was a "slight to the sacrifice and service of thousands of professional and courageous RUC officers who had faced, and in many cases suffered, injury or death". The changes merely signified a transformation, not a disbandment, and memorials to past sacrifices would not be removed, Mr Patten said.
"But the greatest memorial of all will be a peaceful Northern Ireland with agreed institutions, including an agreed police service, with participation and support from the community as a whole. That is a vision which, more than any symbol, might make some sense of the sacrifices of the past," he added.
The report stresses the importance of the ethos and culture of an organisation as an indicator of how it sees itself and how it interacts with others. It says the commission had consulted widely within the RUC and within different communities in Northern Ireland, and had made its proposals after a cultural audit of the entire police establishment, both officers and civilians, of which almost 40 per cent had responded.
The report acknowledges the politicised significance of the RUC's name, badge and symbols to both communities. While automatically alienating nationalists and republicans, they had allowed unionists to claim the RUC as "their" police force. Thus, the report continues, "the argument about symbols is not an argument about policing but an argument about the constitution".
There is particular emphasis in the report on the creation of a "neutral working environment". According to the commission's audit, more than half of all police officers and civilians from minority groups had experienced incidents of harassment over the past five years. It was, therefore, important to recruit not only more Catholics, but nationalists, republicans, women and members of ethnic minorities.