The Chief Constable has been urged to deploy special police units in areas across Northern Ireland living in the shadow of sectarianism.
SDLP leader Mark Durkan issued the personal appeal to Hugh Orde during a meeting yesterday (Tuesday), in which the murder of Catholic teenager Ciaran Cummings topped the agenda.
The 19-year-old was shot dead by renegade members of the UVF in July 2001 and since then his family have been subjected to a campaign of sectarian intimidation.
Mr Durkan requested a meeting with the Chief Constable after the Irish News revealed that a loyalist gang with baseball bats attacked the Cummings's family home earlier this month.
The SDLP leader and party colleague Donovan McClelland presented Mr Orde with a dossier cataloguing numerous murders and recorded incidents of sectarian intimidation in the Antrim area.
The dossier shows that since 1994, 23 murders, including seven sectarian killings, have been carried out in the Antrim borough alone – including that of Mr Cummings.
"When we sat down to do this, I was horrified by the number of murders," Mr McClelland, assembly member for South Antrim, said.
It was noted that seven sectarian murders were committed in Newtownabbey between December 1997 and last July, when Catholic teenager Gerard Lawlor was shot dead by the UFF as he walked home from a pub on the Antrim Road in north Belfast.
According to the document, almost 200 people, whose religious breakdown is not known, have been intimidated in the last four years in the Antrim borough area.
Last night Mr Durkan described as "constructive" the meeting with the Chief Constable in which he challenged Mr Orde over the state of the investigation into the murder of Mr Cummings.
Despite several arrests, no one has been charged with the murder and there has been no significant progress in the police probe for some time.
Mr Durkan pointed out that, while some murders carried out in the Antrim borough were sectarian, "many others" were also loyalist-related.
"We opened the meeting on the Ciaran Cummings case and a number of issues in the Antrim area," he said.
"The Chief Constable undertook to have the senior investigating officer brief us on the case. He indicated that a review (of the investigation) hasn't yet taken place partly, according to him, on the grounds that some issues still needed to be pursued.
"He said there were some lines of inquiry being pursued and that is specifically for evidence purposes. That was his justification for no review yet.
"We still held the point that in these circumstances a review should be occurring."
Mr Durkan said Mr Orde was "encouraged" to meet families of loyalist victims in the Antrim area as "they suffer from a sense their cases are written off and passed over in the wider political context".
And the Chief Constable was urged to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to sectarianism.
"The SDLP wants to see dedicated sectarian crime units established everywhere in the north where sectarianism is a real concern," he said.
The Stevens Report into security force collusion and the overhaul of Special Branch, ordered after the police ombudsman's damning report into the handling of the Omagh bomb investigation, were also discussed.
He added: "In relation to the future of intelligence policing, we were pressing the point that any intelligence gathering in future has to be wholly and solely within the parameters of policing and subject to the accountability mechanisms of policing.
"We want no role for military intelligence, MI5 or any successor version of the Force Research Unit."
