Sometimes, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come. ‘Looking back over the past decade, the landscape of policing in Northern Ireland has been transformed,’ foreign affairs minister Micheál Martin said today. ‘The PSNI is a modern police service, one which …
Tag Archive: police
Jun
30
There’s Always One
The benefit of the doubt (or if you prefer, the presumption of innocence) is one of the longest established principles in the common law. At it’s most blunt, the principle is expressed in Blackstone’s formulation: “better that ten guilty persons …
Apr
17
Threat Level
Justice minister Dermot Ahern says membership of a criminal gang will become a scheduled offence, to be tried in the Special Criminal Court. In the last chapter of Chaos and Conspiracy, when I considered the lessons to be learned from …
Jul
29
Polling The Police
It’s been reported that over half of our police think they should be armed. You can always tell it’s the silly season when stories like this pop up. Growing up, I could always tell when summer had officially started it …
Jul
28
Police Action
‘Lack of evidence keeps cases from courts’, RTÉ reports in a headline summarising the annual report from the Director of Public Prosecutions. My first reaction to the headline was the Homer Response. ‘That’s reassuring’ was my second reaction. My third …