Every day now, dozens of people deliberately get themselves arrested outside the headquarters of the New York Police Department in lower Manhattan. Calmly and with great dignity, they form lines across the entrance to the building, blocking the doorway. The police come along, handcuff the protesters, load them into the back of a van, take them away and charge them with obstruction. For seven weeks now, the same thing happens. The number of people arrested is getting larger all the time: on Monday, for instance, it was 141.
Many of the people being bundled away are well known. They include members of Congress, former mayors of the city, publishers, comedians, singers, lawyers, writers. They even include members of the city's own government.
They're doing this to draw attention to the death of a poor West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo. On February 4th, four policemen killed Mr Diallo, an unarmed and entirely innocent man, by shooting him 41 times in the hallway of his apartment building in the Bronx.
The protest is a poignant and uplifting sign that, even in the wilderness of New York, public morality is not dead. But it also provides, in the wake of the deeply disturbing report of the Commission for Police Complaints in Northern Ireland into the intimidation of Rosemary Nelson by the RUC, something to think about. The protest itself, with its brilliant combination of dignity and effectiveness, is a reminder of how badly Northern Ireland misses the civil rights tradition of passive resistance and civil disobedience.
And the cause of the protest, the savage killing of Amadou Diallo, is a reminder that corrupt and brutal policing can't be explained simply as a function of violent civil conflict.
We don't know whether there was police collusion in the murder of Rosemary Nelson. But the Complaints Commission report reveals something that is in a sense much more serious. It suggests the existence of an internal culture in which, if collusion did exist, it would be impossible for the RUC itself to investigate it. The grotesque situation in which even the RUC chief inspector in charge of investigating complaints of threats against Mrs Nelson was apparently "having difficulty co-operating productively" with his own investigation does even more to undermine confidence in the RUC than actual proof of collusion might do.
Attempts to intimidate or ultimately to assassinate the lawyer might, after all, be the work of a rogue minority. Lack of co-operation with the investigation of those crimes can only be the result of institutionalised sectarianism.
It is easy to blame these problems on the appalling strains exerted on the force by 30 years of conflict. It has to be acknowledged, of course, that sectarianism and paranoia in the RUC just might have something to do with the fact that 300 RUC members have been murdered by the IRA.
SINN Fein's hypocrisy on the issue of policing has been, at times, quite fantastic. On the one hand, the RUC was regularly accused of failing to police petty crime in Catholic areas. On the other, RUC officers attempting to police Catholic areas were open to deadly ambush, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Sinn Fein.
And even the most basic human contact of the kind that might encourage RUC officers to understand and sympathise with their Catholic fellow-citizens has been stamped on. The GAA, of course, will not allow members of the RUC to play hurling or Gaelic football or to take part in the social and convivial side of its activities. Soccer clubs from Catholic areas have been forced by direct intimidation by the IRA and Sinn Fein (in the form, as the Belfast joke had it, of their front organisation DAAFT Direct Action Against Football Teams) to pull out of competitions rather than fulfil fixtures against an RUC team. Killing, abusing and boycotting policemen is hardly a great way to make them less sectarian.
But, and this is where the New York experience comes in, you can have thuggery and bias within a police force even when there is no political conflict in progress. The officers who shot Amadou Diallo 41 times are not the products of a dirty war against terrorism. They are the products of what the report on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in Britain characterised as institutionalised racism. It might be said, in fact, that even in democratic, multicultural societies, the natural condition of the police is brutality towards minorities. The absence of war doesn't guarantee fairness and decency. Only concerted political action and public concern does that. This is the fundamental error of the unionist belief that, when everything settles down, the RUC will, by itself, become a normal police force. But there is, on the nationalist side, an equal and opposite fallacy - the belief that the corruption of the RUC is a simple function of British rule. Nationalists have to realise that one of the persistent ironies of Northern Irish history is that attempts at police reform have generally come from the British and have always been defeated by local sectarianism.
THIS, as Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson reveal in their fine book Northern Ireland 1921-1996, goes right back to the beginnings of Northern Ireland in the early 1920s. In April 1922, at the height of the IRA's campaign and of the vicious Protestant backlash in the North, Maj Gen Sir Arthur Solly-Flood was appointed as military adviser to the Northern Ireland government. One of his principal tasks was the establishment of a viable police force by bringing the sectarian special constabulary, the notorious B Specials, under control. A now familiar pattern played itself out.
Decent men within the B Specials, including three commandants who resigned in disgust, came forward with harrowing tales of sectarian atrocities by their men. Solly-Flood won a degree of Catholic trust by his determination to crack down on Protestant terrorism and police brutality. He brought in English CID detectives to investigate the murders by the RUC and the B Specials of three Catholics in Cushendall. The Englishmen produced damning evidence against the local police to a secret inquiry. The inquiry produced a scathing report on the RUC. The report was suppressed. Solly-Flood and his men were forced out. A pattern that was to be repeated in the inquiries of decent British policemen like John Stalker and John Stevens had been laid down.
That pattern will be broken only when the rule of law is imposed on the RUC. And for all the evidence that there are many decent and conscientious officers within its ranks, it will have to be imposed from the outside. A completely independent investigation of the murder of Rosemary Nelson is the only acceptable evidence that that process has begun.