Investigating past atrocities is costing police in Northern Ireland £12m a year, driven by the need to supply 31 inquests with redacted documents and support a historical enquiries team looking into more than 3,000 unresolved killings.
Deputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie told the policing board in Belfast today: "£12m spent on policing the past is not £12m spent on policing the here and now. We would much rather spend our policing budget on policing the here and now, but we understand there are emotive issues."
According to Gillespie the historical enquiries team alone costs the police service £6m a year. At the same time the service is faced with freezing recruitment and promotions because of the need to make savings. Some building projects have had to be suspended and police are seeking criminal justice reform to reduce the red tape.
The Democratic Unionist board member Jonathan Bell said: "The right to life, currently, and in the future – is it being affected by the amount of police resources going into policing and looking at the human rights aspects of the past?"
While most nationalist parties have supported demands for inquiries into long past events, the government wants to reduce the cost of such efforts.
David Cameron has pledged that there would never again be such an open-ended and costly inquiry again as Lord Saville's Bloody Sunday tribunal into the shootings of 30 January 1972, which cost £195m and took 12 years to complete.
But with many unsolved murders, and families in Northern Ireland who feel their cases have been overlooked, the justice issue is proving difficult to resolve.
South Africa dealt with crimes of the apartheid era by establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined events occurring between 1960 and 1994. A similar commission was recommended last year by Lord Eames and Denis Bradley, who examined how Northern Ireland should deal with the legacy of the Troubles.
If implemented the commission for Northern Ireland would take the place of the historical enquiries team and any ongoing investigations by the police ombudsman, Al Hutchinson.
A group of MPs who examined the proposals stated that Northern Ireland still had not reached consensus on the need for, or value of, a legacy commission.
The Northern Ireland affairs committee found that neither victims nor members of paramilitary organisations were willing to sign up to the idea of a truth and reconciliation process. The committee warned that Northern Ireland could become overburdened with organisations addressing the Troubles.
Hutchinson was in the audience at today's policing board meeting. In the past he has called for an alternative way of resolving the outstanding issues of the conflict. His report last month on the Claudy bombs in Derry, on 31 July 1972, said that talks between the Catholic church, the police and the government had led to a priest, suspected of involvement in the attack, being moved to the Irish Republic. No action, however, was ever taken against the priest, Father James Chesney, who died in 1980.