FROM Jabalya refugee camp to Jerusalem, London and Washington, Palestinian security reform means different things to different people. Somewhere in the centre is a 49-year-old Ulsterman, trying to find some consensus.

But being stuck in the middle of a difficult situation is nothing new for Jonathan McIvor, a chief superintendent with 22 years’ policing experience in London and Ulster.

Last July he was working in Drumcree, the traditional flashpoint of Northern Ireland’s marching season. It was a perfect training ground for someone now helping the Palestinians to rebuild and modernise their police infrastructure.

Overseas intelligence agencies have begun the wider task of overhauling the other Palestinian intelligence and security services.

The task of Chief Superintendent McIvor’s EU Copps — EU Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support — is to focus on the civil police, in one of whose powder-blue cars he was bouncing over speed humps in Gaza.

The goal of the EU Copps is to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and image of the Palestinian Authority’s 18,600strong police force, two thirds of which is in Gaza.

Twin-track programmes are the means to this end. There is a long-term transformational plan for the drafting of legislation and the assessment of priorities.

There is also an operational plan to raise morale and to boost performance through immediate steps such as supplying 54 new cars to the West Bank force, rebuilding a training centre in Jericho and setting up a computer network in Jabalya.

Mr McIvor’s task is made harder in a society that has no state of its own, and whose powerful neighbour — Israel — regards all Palestinian Authority agencies as at least complicit, if not actively involved, in attacks on Jewish soldiers, settlers and civilians.

The veteran policeman is, however, quick to point out that the Palestinian police force was only established in 1994, and since then has had 45 police stations and buildings destroyed in Israeli incursions, including three rocket attacks on the building to which he was speeding.

“Since Oslo and the ‘road map’ the focus has been on what the Palestinian police needed to do to ensure Israeli security,” he said.

“I understand that, and it is an important part of the task. But it’s equally an important part to provide a police service that ensures safety and security for the Palestinian people.

“These are not mutually exclusive.”

Mr McIvor, whose first-year start-up costs were paid by Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), is visiting the office of Brigadier-General Majed al-Kafarna, the director of North Gaza’s police district, for an update on how the operational plan is progressing.

The news is broadly positive. DFID-funded computers have been installed and networked within the station but not, as Mr McIvor hoped, linked with other stations, because more money is needed.

Instead of fitting the newest computer on his own desk as a status symbol, as might have been expected, General al-Kafarna packed it off to an outlying station that was bombed by Israel, in order to improve morale.

In a back office another computer is being used to update records from cupboards collapsing under the weight of paper files, and in the front office a third contains all court summons and criminal records from 2005, allowing outlying stations to call in and check on anyone they have arrested.

“That’s money really well spent,” Mr McIvor said. “It’s a small amount injected at a critical time at a critical place.”

Times Recommends

• The Japanese Prime Minister is doomed: or is he?
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it's all in the mind