The district police partnership boards which the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland recommends should be set up by each of the North's district councils were "not a recipe for recruiting terrorists into the police, as scaremongers have claimed", the commission's chairman, Mr Chris Patten, emphasised yesterday.
Speaking at a press conference in Belfast to launch the commission's report, he said the boards had been the subject of "some alarmist and misleading speculation" over the past two weeks.
The report recommends that each district council establish a district policing partnership board (DPPB), as a committee of the council, with a majority of elected members. There should be monthly meetings between the DPPB and the police district commander, at which the police should present reports and answer questions.
The report recommends that district councils should have the power to contribute an amount initially up to the equivalent of a rate of 3p in the pound towards the improved policing of their district, which could enable the DPPB to purchase additional services from the police or other statutory agencies, or from the private sector.
Mr Patten explained that if a board wanted a service for which the police did not have adequate funds available, the board and the police would have flexibility to reach some arrangement. "We know from talking to police area commanders that this would be welcome to them. It could mean hiring private companies to clean up graffiti and painted kerbstones."
The district boards would have only a "consultative relationship" with the local police commander, said Mr Patten, who added that legislation could be drafted to "specify precisely" what the 26 district councils were allowed to do with the £6 million in total that they would be allowed to contribute towards the improved policing of their districts.
Mr Patten said there were "plenty" of aspects of the commission's report which could be implemented regardless of overall political progress, and which did not hinge on the existence of a Northern Ireland executive or a functioning Northern Ireland Assembly. But the full implementation of the recommendations was desirable, he added.
"The recommendations form a package which we believe needs to be implemented comprehensively. We counsel strongly against cherry-picking from the report, or trying to implement some major elements of it in isolation from others."
He stressed that progress in implementing the report was dependent on the security and the political situation. "But progress on the report will, in my judgment, help the political situation, not the other way round."
Now that the report had been published, he said it was "imperative" that Catholic, nationalist and republican leaders "get off the fence". He said the Catholic community must now accept that it was time to support policing so a more peaceful and stable and prosperous society could be created.
He acknowledged that the report may cause "pain" for past and serving officers of the RUC.
Mr Patten stressed that the RUC was not being disbanded but, rather, transformed, with a key aim of the report being to depoliticise the policing issue.
He said some people who opposed the Belfast Agreement itself would doubtless try to distort the proposals. "But I hope that the fair-minded and concerned majority, not least in the police service itself, will give this report the serious and honest consideration that I believe it deserves. If this is not the way forward, I simply do not know what is."