NCJ Number
138269
Journal
Policing and Society Volume: 2 Issue: 3 Dated: (1992) Pages: 233-243
Date Published
1992
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Police Liaison Committees (PLC's) were established in Northern Ireland to cultivate good community relations, obtain the views of citizens regarding policing matters, promote understanding of the limits on police responses to local problems, and foster solutions to local problems. Interviews with representatives of 17 PLC's yielded data used to evaluate the committees' composition and links to their communities, the range of issues typically on their agendas, and their impact.
Abstract
The research found that the PLC's are generally small groups of elected elites who are not representative of their communities; only five of the committees included in this study have appointed lay members of the community and few of these members represent grassroots interests. Most interviewees claimed that the district councillors who also sit on the PLC's represent the community and that lay members might present a security risk. Because of local politics as well as demographic conditions, most PLC's are led and dominated by Protestants and Unionists, and as a result, are strongly pro-police. Rather than being involved with significant community issues including police-community relations, patterns of complaints against the police, major police policies, and community attitudes toward the police, PLC's seem to deal almost exclusively with mundane issues including traffic problems, teenage drinking, and vandalism. Most of the PLC representatives interviewed for this study failed to identify any major impact of their committee's activities; the greatest effect of the liaison committees has been to provide a formal channel of communication between the police and district councillors. While the present system of PLC's could serve as a foundation for the development of a more effective liaison system, Northern Ireland's communal friction, security situation, and political polarization would seem to preclude any progress toward that goal. 16 notes and 17 references