The Policing You Don’t See

The programme of police reform ushered in by the peace settlement placed great emphasis on accountability and transparency. As this report details, the Patten Report explicitly recommended that these principles should apply to covert policing. Despite this the British Government, in a paper appended to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, set out “future national security arrangements in Northern Ireland” which shifted the most sensitive areas of covert policing in the opposite direction, effectively ring fencing them outside the post-Patten accountability arrangements