Jon Burrows: The craven pandering to Sinn Fein by senior PSNI officers will change policing and its board

As a result of the resilience of two young officers, the unstinting support of the Police Federation and the diligence of the legal team the course of policing in Northern Ireland will change forever. In future senior leaders in the PSNI would be very foolish to ever allow political pressure, however apocalyptic, to subvert their independence or cause them to sacrifice those they lead.

The operational independence of policing from political direction is a sacred pillar of our democracy; it is a bulwark against corruption and arbitrary justice. The police are servants of the law and the law only, they must not bow to political whim or public clamour and must never take political direction. It’s a sobering reflection of how corroded basic democratic policing principles have become that the most senior officers in the land effectively went to court claiming it was in the public interest to suspend an honest police officer to dampen political disquiet.

The HMIC report into the Bobby Storey funeral fiasco contained numerous red flags about undocumented and unaccountable joint operational policing by senior PSNI leaders and Sinn Fein. However, the unknowing or unwilling Policing Board members just shuffled into their next cosy meeting as if the people they were supposed to be holding to account had been given a clean bill of health. Never again can such ruinous stewardship over policing be allowed.

The atrocity at Sean Graham’s bookmakers on the Lower Ormeau Road February 5 1992 was a heinous crime and the lack of justice for bereaved families and survivors is appalling. However, none of those involved in the campaign against the miscarriage of justice inflicted on two young men in February 2021 has anything other than abhorrence for the perpetrators of that mass murder and complete sympathy for the victims.

Admittedly, emotions were fraught after the interaction between the police and the public near the memorial stone. However, the top officers in our land should be able to display calm leadership in a crisis and not take leave of their senses. From a professional perspective, it was a very manageable crisis, because the cold facts captured clearly on the officer's camera were completely different to what was portrayed by many politicians – who irresponsibly arrived at serious conclusions based on a mobile phone clip.

A simple referral to the Police Ombudsman so that public complaints could be independently investigated, combined with a parallel investigation into the officer's allegation of being assaulted and some sensible myth-busting could have defused this entire situation in hours.

Instead, when Sinn Fein members made statements that created the impression the memorial service was deliberately attacked by rogue officers; the chief constable gave an unprecedented news conference in the fading light of a wintry Saturday evening and announced he was suspending one of his officers. The misconduct was apparently so grave, that the chief constable said he was going to spend his Saturday evening writing to the families of the victims of the massacre.

The suspension decision combined with the tone, timing and content of the chief constable’s press conference, where he was flanked by his deputy who was the actual decision maker, served to validate in the public mind that something very sinister had occurred. In policing, a strategy of inflaming instead of defusing community tension never ends well. Despite the hysteria, we now know, and our de facto chief constable must have known then, that there was nothing sinister in what happened.

While the judicial review may just have concluded on August 29, but as far back as February 6 2021 the former chief constable and his deputy watched the exact same body worn video that I have watched and analysed before they suspended an officer. The video instantly and incontrovertibly refuted that there was any whiff of bad faith by the officers. The infamous picture of an officer standing in front of several women who are backed up to the memorial stone is highly misleading, a snippet of social media devoid of context. It created the impression the officers intervened during the memorial, which in fact was over by several minutes.

Perhaps the politicians had nothing else to go on, but the former chief constable and his deputy did – yet their decision making was based on the rumours instead of the facts.

I’ve never known a colleague in Northern Ireland to bend the knee in the face of physical threat; the least they can expect is their senior leaders have the commensurate moral courage to defend their honour when they faithfully uphold the law. I have immense pride and admiration for the two young men who found themselves in this nightmare; they displayed more patience and grace in the face of adversity than I’ve ever seen. What they deserved from their boss was a pat on the back, not a push in front of an oncoming bus.

Years ago the former chief constable introduced a new strapline to capture the essence of how the PSNI should treat people – it's called We Care; We Listen and We Act. On February 6 2021 those at the top cared about the wrong things, listened to the wrong people and acted in the wrong way.

This can never happen again.

• Jon Burrows is a retired senior PSNI officer

• Owen Polley is away