The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has wasted resources on dubious deployments elsewhere, when it could be devoting them to tackling racist violence at home, it has been revealed.
In a freedom of information (FOI) request, the anti-racist group End Deportations Belfast (EDB) asked the police force how many times it’d sent cops to back other forces between 1 January 2024 and 10 August 2026. There were a total of 26 such deployments, including five where 50 or more officers were sent away.
Among these was an occasion in October 2025 when 50 PSNI officers went to London to arrest peaceful anti-genocide supporters backing proscribed direct action group, Palestine Action.
EDB said it is “deeply concerned” about what it has uncovered.
A spokesperson told the Canary:
We are deeply concerned around the lack of transparency on how PSNI officers are deployed across the UK as part of the policing ‘mutual aid’ arrangement. These operations have a knock on effect on officers who are often reported to be suffering from burnout following cancelled rest days. Many of these deployments seem frivolous in comparison to the work the PSNI should be undertaking at home.
PSNI arrest anti-genocide activists while Belfast burns
People Before Profit MLA, Gerry Carroll, questioned the PSNI’s focus on cuffing peaceful protesters at a time when “Loyalist paramilitaries — proscribed organisations — again threaten to violently attack public services because of the Irish language”.
The London deployment came a year after the UN warned Stormont about failure to tackle racist loyalist paramilitary violence. Belfast Livereported:
The UN experts called for “robust measures” to combat paramilitary intimidation and violence, and for the Stormont government to “systematically collect information on these acts of intimidation and ensure that cases of paramilitary racist violence and intimidation are promptly and effectively investigated, prosecuted and punished”.
That was in 2024. It is now 2026 and there have been three successive summers of ethnic cleansing in the north of Ireland, orchestrated by the gangs Carroll and the UN warned about.
Stormont cut funding for the Paramilitary Crime Task Force (PCTF) by 21% for the tax year 2024/25, and the funding has yet to be replaced.
You would think far-right thugs driving masses of people out of their homes each summer would make a crackdown on this paramilitary-driven violence a priority, but apparently not for Stormont and the PSNI. Politicians from the Democratic Unionist Party and Traditional Unionist Voice have echoed far-right rhetoric, indicating one reason for Stormont’s inaction.
Six Counties cops also coddled Donald Trump
These priorities have obviously filtered down to the Six Counties’ police force, who seemingly also wasted time protecting war criminal President Donald Trump rather than tackle loyalist pogroms at home. End Deportations Belfast (EDB) say that in the Freedom of Information response:
…the key dates roughly align with: Donald Trump’s visit to Turnberry (23 July 2025 deployment); [and] Donald Trump’s state visit (15 September 2025 deployment)
The anti-racist group also notes that the PSNI has seemingly stopped acting as a ‘donor force’ since those arrests of Palestine Action supporters in October 2025, possibly as a result of the huge negative response to their actions.
The Canary criticised this deployment at the time, both for the targets of PSNI repression and the unjustifiable use of resources from a force that already claimed to be overstretched:
The supposedly skeletal Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) this weekend chose to devote its scant resources to travelling to London, where they then proceeded to bundle peaceful pensioners into the back of police vans. Their crime? Opposing genocide by highlighting their support for proscribed pro-Palestine group Palestine Action.
EDB rightly accused chief constable Jon Boutcher of a “complete error of judgement” for these previous decisions, however. A move that “put communities at risk”, notably people of colour, migrants and Muslims who remain in extreme danger from a loyalist threat still not taken seriously by Stormont or the PSNI.
Featured image via Niall Carson/ PA
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