Anybody willing to open their eyes wil recognise that working class communities in the north including those with long histories and legacies of resistance to British / loyalist repression are being reduced to a shadow of their former selves by criminal and anti-social elements. Random assaults, drug epidemics and anti-social crimes such as creeper burglaries and death driving have made once proud communities a place of real fear for many (including republicans) who grew up in streets once bound together by strong ties of solidarity and neighbourly responsibility.There are many arguable causes for the boom in anti-social crime; economic deprivation, generational conflict related stress, neglect and despair all may well hold the key to understanding why so many of our young choose to attack their own communities.However in the run up to politically driven deadlines on parties here 'signing up to policing arrangments' anti-social activities in areas like west Belfast, Derry city, and Newry reached unparalelled proportions with stabbings, beatings, murders and a whole host of anti-social crimes leaping into the headlines. It appeared that communities were facing a crisis, they were.Appearing alongside endless editorials about impending social crises were suggestions from constitutional nationalist politicians that engagement with British policing here was the only answer to our problems, the concept of Policing partnership was being sold to us while we were in a state of fear.There is no evidence that republican engagment with the RUC/PSNI is or will in the future provide a significant solution to our communities difficulties, there is ample evidence however to suggest that it is damaging our districts further. Many of the worst anti-social hoods are in the direct pay of the RUC/PSNI who in return for low level intelligence on republicans and others are given a licence to wreck, torture rob and ruin. Indeed republicans have every right to suggest that the social crises which faced working class nationalist areas in the run up to deadlines for acceptance of policing arrangments were created by the RUC/PSNI, with anti-social criminals being directed by handlers to create havoc and a sense of hopelessness in their areas in the hope of painting the DPPs as the only answer.Sinn Fein’s endorsement of the RUC/PSNI is of course also an acceptance of the British occupation of Ireland, given that nationalists and republicans are being encouraged to work in a proactive way with a police force unwilling to even negotiate its accountabilty regarding 'security issues' nor the tactics it uses to maintain the security of the British state here, a police force it is important to add, which celebrates the framing and wrongful imprisonment of republicans as well as openly advocating a policy of targeting vulnerable young people for use as informants.Publically engaging with such a force and in our own communities gives their activities and their ultimate responsibility (security of the British state in Ireland) a venere of respectabillity and gives credence to their assertion that 'they are the solution'.Such a 'solution' to our very real problems can never be proposed by principled revolutionaty republicans as a substitute for community solidarity in the face of an upsurge in anti-social crime. We fear that this "tactic" (engagment with the RUC/PSNI) will cement and advance pro British interests as well as further demoralise and disempower an already vulnerable grassroots republican base . As such we cannot contemplate actively supporting such a force or its cosmetic civilian bodies in the form of Policing boards or D.P.Ps. To do so would contribute to the upholding of the status quo in occupied Ireland.
