The most revealing observation among the 450 dense pages of evidence and statistics about the composition, recruitment and training of the RUC amassed by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the British Parliament over the last year came from Colin Smith, the Inspector of Constabulary.
Testifying that there is an excessive caution in introducing change within the RUC, he said: "There is a tendency to want to set up a working party, to want to go round and check the temperature in many places and look for ideas, and reluctance to reach the point where a decision has to be made."
As a symptom of the slow pace of RUC change, the committee pointed to the continued importance of drill in the training system and questioned its significance to the skills required of modern police officers.
But while the committee of 13 MPs, chaired by the former Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Peter Brooke, correctly diagnosed the patient, theirs is decidedly weak medicine and not the strong tonic required to spark the British government, RUC and Police Authority into action.
More significantly, its observations are based on a flawed, mistaken concept of how a society as deeply divided as that in Northern Ireland should be policed.
The mistake that was made in 1922, when the RUC was created, was to bind it firmly into the unionist firmament. It was given the "royal" prefix as a sop to the unionist community and it was tasked to defend the Border of the partitioned six counties as well as maintain law and order.
From the outset, the unionist administration discouraged Catholic participation in its ranks. The final alienation between Catholics and the RUC came in 1969, when the British army had to be deployed to restore order.
Since then, despite the violent ordeal it has suffered at the hands of the IRA and loyalists, with 301 officers murdered and 13,000 injured, the RUC has changed beyond recognition. Apart from its extraordinary courage, the men and women who comprise its ranks of 13,000, have developed a growing professionalism and demonstrated an increasing willingness to act in an even-handed and impartial way.
The agenda necessary to convert this willingness into actual change has long been clear and, as Colin Smith noted, action has been inhibited by a lack of leadership from RUC commanders and the longstanding failure of the Police Authority, as the report says, "to take a more active role in the scrutiny of the work of the RUC".
It must be said the committee of MPs too has wasted the opportunity to give a more radical lead and help the RUC to shed the shackles of its history more effectively.
Although the MPs generated a predictable fuss with the proposal that future RUC recruits should be banned from membership of secret, oath-bound organisations, and prompted anger by suggesting the Union flag should no longer fly over police stations on July 12th, they have merely highlighted symptoms of the deeper problem and prescribed a minimum response.
The committee's fundamental error is in reasserting that because Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom, the Union flag is the appropriate flag to fly over police stations. In so doing it perpetuates the 1922 mistake by continuing to place the RUC in the British/ unionist tradition.
It therefore fatally compromises the credibility of what, it must be said, is anyway an altogether too rosy scenario for improving relations between Catholics and the police and attracting a flood of young Catholic men and women into RUC ranks.
Although there is an implicit recognition of the divisions in Northern Ireland society running through the report, it underestimates their rigidity and fails to take sufficient account of the nationalist perspective and sensitivities. Notably, there is no recognition of the growing alienation between the RUC and hostile sections of the Protestant community.
If the RUC is to win the consent, co-operation and participation of the entire Northern community, it will have to stand impartially between the two traditions. In the aftermath of the equality agenda enshrined in the Belfast Agreement, this concept is even more compelling.
So whatever the strength of the flag of the country argument, the RUC should not and must not be placed in a position where it is seen, however benignly, to be siding with one side or the other.
This strict neutrality should inform its entire culture and working practices. When a man or woman puts on a police uniform, they should leave their prejudices and opinions behind. If they do not wish to do so, and maintain memberships and associations incompatible with impartial policing, they should not be entitled to serve as constable.
The report's failure to insist on a statutory duty of impartiality for police officers is another weakness.
By failing to grasp the essential need for neutrality between the communities and fashion it as the cornerstone of a new policing order in Northern Ireland, the Brooke committee has disappointed.
While the report is not binding on the British government or the RUC and has been overtaken by a new Police Act, now pushed through parliament, it has, above all, been overshadowed by the existence of the more powerful Patten Commission, which is charged, under the Belfast Agreement, to bring forward a comprehensive blueprint for the future of Northern policing.
The thoroughness with which Brooke and the MPs gathered evidence and compiled background material has created a valuable roadmap for Patten, despite the analytical failure.
Chris Ryder, a former member of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, is the author of The RUC: A Force Under Fire