Chief Inspector Joe McMinn speaks to the Fermanagh Herald
HE HAS the onerous task of managing one of the toughest budgets cuts ever seen in the PSNI.
Meet Fermanagh’s new area commander, Chief Inspector Joe McMinn – the face of the county’s police force and answerable to you, the public.
The north Armagh man is at the helm of Fermanagh and Omagh’s policing after taking up the role earlier this summer.
In his first interview with the Fermanagh Herald, the father-of-two outlines his pledge against IRA activity despite the sweeping cuts, the challenges posed by rural Fermanagh and his plans to limit the impact of the impending seven per cent budget cuts.
Inspector McMinn reveals the major revamp to local and neighbourhood policing and the impact of reduced police presence on our streets.
After joining what was then the RUC 25 years ago, Inspector McMinn’s background stems from uniformed policing, covering a vast amount of towns and rural areas with the TSG (Tactical Support Group) as well as spending a year with the United Nations in the Balkans.
He openly admits the motivation for joining the police force was to help ‘vulnerable people’.
Reinforcing the importance of building relationships between communities and the PSNI, he said: “As the old saying goes, policing is not just police, we need help from the community and that’s becoming more and more important as the cuts bite this year and all the indications are that they will be worse next year so that’s a major challenge.
“Another big challenge is the sheer size of Fermanagh and the number of police we have which was a challenge at the best of times but now that we have these budget cuts it’s a bigger challenge because every penny will have to be accounted for, we have to be so careful with how we use our resources and ultimately we will have less police officers on the ground so we have to police smarter and we do need much more help from the community.
“We would spend about £70m so it’s about a seven per cent cut and that’s for everyone.
That will include our vehicles and our police officers between now and April.
“It’s a matter of policing smarter, looking at the make-up of our teams between the response and neighbourhood teams in areas like Enniskillen, Lisnaskea, Kesh and looking at how we work that to our best advantage and to the community. Our overall aim is to keep people safe and we won’t waver from that.
“We will be more focussed on incidents reported to us rather than preventative patrolling. There’s every possibility the public will see a reduced police presence on the ground.
“But if they don’t report incidents then we won’t know about them. I will be putting a greater focus on police responding to areas where the crimes are occurring so it’s more important than ever that people do report incidents. Quite a few officers here are Fermanagh-based people and brought up in a rural area so are very switched on to rural crime, they know about it and are focussed on it.”
In a bid to allay rising public fears after a major explosives haul in Kinawley last week in which a 43-year-old man was arrested and charged in connection to dissident republican activity, Inspector McMinn said that this part of the budget should be ring-fenced.
“In our aim to keep people safe, part of that is the dissident republican threat so we’ll always target our resources to what is the biggest threat to keeping our community safe and that budget should still be there and there’s no indication it won’t be,” he added.
He appealed to local politicians to play their part in stamping out dissident republican activity as well as calling on community representatives to use their influence to ‘reduce terrorist activities’.
“Any find or any operations that are carried out in which a potential terrorist incident is stopped, benefits the whole community.
“I would ask anyone who are supporting this to reflect on what they are doing. Local people could be killed if stored explosives goes off prematurely.
“There was a lot of bomb-making type equipment recovered and while none of us will really know what it stopped, no doubt it stopped people, both the community and police being maimed or murdered. It’s a good result for us.”
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