The sun is up and temperatures are already in the sweltering 70s. A perfect day for a spot of gentle community policing and bonding. Sgt Stephen Jones and his six-strong team leave Musgrave St police station on foot, heading for their usual turf in Belfast's Markets Estates area. Just like bobbies on the beat in Finchley. . . Or maybe not. Estates in Finchley aren't festooned with Tricolours or daubed with murals demanding the force's disbandment. The Finchley bobby isn't required to perspire under the weight of a steel-plated, 30lb flak jacket, nor a heavy, black Heckler & Koch rifle, nor a handgun and pouches of spare bullets.
However familiar the media pictures, in reality there remains something deeply shocking about a bunch of ordinary, uniformed men and women entering an ordinary Irish housing estate on a sunny day, like soldiers on high alert in a war zone. And there is something deeply poignant about cheerful, well-intentioned people like Sgt Jones and young Constable Caroline Reid, determined to patrol without rifles, the better to resemble the ordinary, trusted bobbies they want to be. But with four other officers stalking them like cats, spread far apart to provide maximum cover, rifles weaving out front - always aware that a young colleague of theirs was blown apart at this spot only four years ago - it's a difficult image to pull off.
The point though, is that they are trying. Really trying,. As the odd local bends the ear of Constable Michael Ogilvie (known here as "Yorkshire Bill" because of his Manchester roots), Caroline Reid engages the children, and the other banter with a few likely lads while a well known IRA gunman struts by. Only the terminally cynical could doubt this team's sincerity. "You just have to keep pushing and pushing, keep showing them that you are impartial and there to help them," says Sgt Jones. "We provide a service and we must be there. If we're not there, those other individuals will fill the vacuum." He is not scare-mongering. Hobbling around this same estate is a teenage boy who "was summoned into an alleyway not long ago and had his leg blown clean off". His crime? Stealing from a car, allegedly. "These are good, decent people," says Constable Nick Morgan. "They deserve better than that."
This is the image of the RUC that its bosses desperately want to project. But time and tide are against them. Though characterised by Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan as "the bulwark between anarchy and order" for 30 years, this is a force in dire need of a series of public relations coups, if not something more fundamental. Some facts are inarguable and they all know it. The dogs in the street bark that in a population that is 40 per cent Catholic, its representation in the RUC is just 8per cent. This compares with around 10 per cent in the 1960s and 21 per cent in 1923. The actual figure today is 977 out of a total of 13,300. While officers seek solace in a recent Police Authority survey showing that half of all Northern Catholics were happy with the RUC's service, the same survey revealed that another 35 per cent were demanding its disbandment. In a Daily Telegraph survey published this week, 79 per cent of Catholics believed the RUC needed radical reform or at least some degree of change, while the corresponding figure for Protestants was a surprisingly high 36 per cent. Lurking behind these figures is the unsettling finding of yet another survey, the product of internal RUC research, which found that nearly a third of all Catholic officers had experienced religious harassment from colleagues and more than a fifth had considered leaving due to that or discrimination. Hardly any wonder then, that high on the nationalist shopping list for any agreement was police reform.
Although any such immediate initiatives have been put on the back burner to await the deliberations of the Patten Commission, this is a force under intense pressure - emotional, mental, financial and political. And all while the force is "choking" on the prisoner and decommissioning issues, according to one source. "The mood is hard to describe at the moment. . . apprehensive and cynical at the same time, maybe." The cynicism stems from the belief that the commission is nothing more than a sop to the nationalists; the apprehensiveness from the fear of simply being discarded to suit some political agenda, of being replaced by "thugs and serial killers" in some misguided effort to get all-community support.
Even the word "reform" is considered hurtful. "It's as if we're being asked to disown everything that went before," says Les Rodgers, chairman of the Police Federation. "We are the cement that held the province together in the Troubles; then there's peace and suddenly we're told that we are the problem."
As for what went before, they naturally prefer to dwell on the heroic and the tragic rather than the mad and the bad in their midst. No-one wants to deal with the allegations surrounding torture of suspects in the 1970s, the shoot-to-kill policy in the 1980s, collusion with loyalist murder gangs in the 1990s, the kicking to death last year of a young Catholic allegedly in full view of several indifferent RUC men. . . The furthest any of them will go towards admitting there are problems is a general remark about "a few bad apples in every sector" - and that internment was a "big mistake", the product of poor intelligence which left a lasting and bitter legacy.
Bias? "The force has never behaved in a biased way," insists Supt Brian McCargo, a deputy divisional commander, who also happens to be a Catholic from the Ardoyne. "But if you ask me about individuals, that's different. . ." Harassment or discrimination within the force? "I've seen none of it. I don't see discrimination in this force, not to the extent that the survey said."
Others take a more detached view. "There is a canteen culture here just as there is in every force," says Les Rodgers. "Some people are unaware of what they're saying. The big one is: `Sure, you're playing the Green card" or it could be `the Orange card'. That survey isn't a record of things that were said or done in the past month. I see it as a history of things said over the years that shouldn't have been said." Chris Ryder, a former member of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland and author of The RUC: A Force Under Fire, is less sanguine: "RUC canteen culture is still stubbornly male-dominated, Protestant, British and unionist and there remains a hard-core allegiance to values and practices that compromise the concept of an even-handed, impartial police service." Privately, a senior source suggests that the seeds for the "bad apples" were planted in the 1970s, when the force suddenly ballooned from around 3,000 to four times that and the average recruit was just 20 years old (compared with about 27 now). "In the rush to recruit, a lot were taken on who should never have been allowed near the place - and they're still here."
As for the heroic and the tragic, a great deal of the hurt stems from the fact that the RUC is visibly steeped in both. An officer who opened the Daily Telegraph one day last month to find the photographs of 299 murdered colleagues spread across two pages, said it felt like he'd been hit with a brick. "I served with many of them, had been to the scenes of many of their murders," says Sgt Les Rodgers, "and I had dealt with all that, I suppose, by just pushing it to the back of my mind. When I opened the paper that day, I had to steel myself not to burst into tears."
Of those 299 dead RUC men and women, 277 were murdered by the IRA, two of them only last June. Some 8,300 have been injured - many left without limbs, crippled, blinded, in chronic pain after attacks by gun, bombs and petrol bombs loaded with acid or with sugar or paint to ensure they stuck - in the course of their duties. After trying to hold the line post-1985 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, more than 700 of them suffered intimidation of varying degrees - largely from loyalists. The high levels of stress-related illness are reflected in at least 55 suicides recorded since the start of the Troubles.
RUC widows, who have formed their own association, are dismayed that men who murdered their husbands will probably qualify for early release. "The victims have been forgotten in all this," its chairwoman, Iona Meyer, who was left two small children aged six and two when her husband was shot eight years ago, said recently. "The RUC Widows' Association was never consulted."
Nor was the Disabled Police Officers' Association. Sam Malcolmson was only 22 in 1972, when he and a colleague served as undercover officers in Crossmaglen. The children of the local shopkeeper used to come up to play tennis on the lawn outside the police station. Then they stopped coming. When he walked into the shop one day and the woman remained at the back, he knew she had been warned off: "I think it would be a lot easier if we didn't come in here?" he suggested. She burst into tears.
Soon afterwards, he and a colleague went out to retrieve some sensitive equipment left behind after a young lieutenant had been killed in an IRA ambush. On the way back, they broke a cardinal rule: to save half an hour, they returned the same way they came. The sniper scored again. A bullet passed right through the young officer's body and his colleague was hit in the back. They somehow managed to get the car back to the station two miles away. His colleague, who has since died, lost a lung. He himself lost the use of his left leg, over which he now wears a long caliper. The exit wound in his back still oozes shrapnel 26 years later; he needs daily morphine to manage the pain and sometimes experiences terrifying flashbacks while in confined spaces. He relates all this quite matter of factly, his voice quivering only when he talks of his mother. He was still unconscious when she dropped dead at his bedside the day after the shooting. She was only 48.
One of the most tragic aspects of obvious disability for people like Sam Malcolmson is that it made them marked men in a whole new way. "I couldn't confess that I'd been shot because it would be assumed that I was IRA and had been knee-capped, or that I was ex-security forces. So you had to come up with a story to kill the questions. . . Mine was that I'd driven while drunk, had an accident and lost my licence. When we went anywhere, we had to tell the kids to say that Daddy was a plumber or in the civil service - anything but the truth, that he was a policeman."