N Ireland police fear target on their backs after data blunder

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Claire — not her real name — joined Northern Ireland’s police force nine years ago. A sergeant now in her 30s, she belongs to the “peace generation” that has grown up since the conflict of the “Troubles” ended in 1998. Yet she rarely tells people where she works.

Two officers have been murdered since 2009 and in February this year, a senior detective narrowly escaped alive after being shot at point-blank range. All the attacks were claimed by dissident republicans opposed to the region’s peace process.

“It is quite evident that on a daily basis there are people that want to kill us,” Clare said.

When the Police Service of Northern Ireland last week accidentally published a database identifying its entire 10,000 officers and staff, their units and locations — which it admitted may have been passed to dissident groups — many feared their own employer had put a target on their backs.

Even after a quarter-century of peace, Northern Ireland’s still-active paramilitary gangs make it a post-conflict society that has been transformed but cannot entirely relax.

Claire was first “gobsmacked” then angry and afraid after the breach. “It makes you even more anxious and on edge,” she said. She works in a front-line role and still routinely checks under her car for booby traps even 25 years after the landmark Good Friday Agreement ended the conflict involving Irish Republican Army paramilitaries fighting to reunite Ireland, loyalist gunmen seeking to keep Northern Ireland in the UK, and British forces.

“This [data leak] is handing them [dissident republicans] information that they wouldn’t have had before. It might be the final piece of the jigsaw to identify someone,” Claire said. “It doesn’t take too long to join the dots.”

Only five months ago, UK intelligence increased the terror threat to “severe” — shorthand for an attack being seen as highly likely. The 25th anniversary this week of the Omagh bombing, in which a car bomb planted by dissident republicans killed 29 people, underscores what is at stake.

The data dump also highlights the struggle to recruit and retain Catholics and nationalists in the PSNI, which was rebranded as a “service” not a “force” when it was launched in 2001 to succeed the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

A policy of 50:50 recruitment lifted the share of Catholic officers from 8 per cent to around 30 per cent, but was halted in 2011. “Reform happened, but it has stalled,” said Brendan O’Leary, a University of Pennsylvania professor and co-author of an influential book on reforming the region’s police.

The data lapses were a “really poor advert for policing” especially for anyone from a Catholic background in places hostile to the police, said Professor William Matchett, a longtime former RUC and PSNI special branch senior detective.

Claire, who comes from a unionist background, says it is “tempting” to move away or quit but for now she will continue doing the job she loves.

The PSNI said no one had yet been rehoused because of the blunder. It added that over the past six years 11 officers — four Protestants and seven Catholics — had been forced to sell their homes and move due to security concerns.

Stephen White, a former assistant chief constable and one of nearly 1,200 officers and their families who had to be relocated during the Troubles, sometimes at 24 hours’ notice, recalled vans pulling up at homes in the dead of night and spiriting away police officers and their families — with all their “pets, motor vehicles, trinkets and toys”.

“The world crashed around us,” said White.

Last Tuesday’s data blunder was swiftly compounded by another self-inflicted wound when the PSNI admitted a separate spreadsheet had been lost a month earlier.

That data was on a police-issue laptop taken, together with a police radio, when a private car believed to belong to a superintendent was stolen in an area where loyalist paramilitary gangs involved in drug trafficking and organised crime are active.

The laptop was swiftly wiped, but the error reinforced the impression of a cavalier attitude to data from an organisation meant to keep people safe.

The PSNI, which already faces a £38mn funding gap, is bracing for hefty potential fines over data protection. Nearly a third of officers have already said they could seek compensation.

Mary Traynor, legal director on the data, privacy and cyber team at law firm Lewis Silkin in Northern Ireland, said compensation could be awarded for physical harm or “non-material” damage such as anxiety and distress.

“In 2016 the High Court in England awarded damages ranging from £2,500 to £12,500 to six asylum seekers . . . following a breach of their personal data by the Home Office,” she said. “Damages awards could be higher for certain individuals affected by this incident,” she added, because of the terror threat level and claims by dissident republicans that they have the data.

Liam Kelly, chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland that represents rank-and-file officers, said he could not remember a time when morale was so low for officers already “hammered on poor pay, a painful cost of living crisis and a shocking delay in getting a new pay award approved”.

Officers say policing itself may now become more difficult as informants could think twice and may doubt offers of witness protection.

“I’m conscious people might not trust us as much now . . . if we can’t look after our own,” said Claire.