Are Finnish Police Racists? A Critical Analysis of Police Cadets' Attitudes towards African Immigrants in Finland

Abstract

Although studies on police attitudes in Finland are quite scarce, the attempt to understand police cadets' attitudes has received even less empirical attention. It is generally assumed that police and ethnic minorities' relations brim with mutual suspicions. The empirical research literature supports this assumption that this relationship is filled with mutual misconceptions. Using a questionnaire, we tried to test these hypotheses through the responses of police cadets who had spent the mandatory 2.5 years of police cadet training in the Finnish Police School. This was in addition to a voluntary in-depth interview on a one-to-one basis. The questionnaire was introduced to two sets of graduating police cadet students in their classrooms. The questionnaire used contained a set of questions, which were used to extract information from the respondents in order to gain a broader understanding of police cadet attitudes towards their contacts with African immigrants in Finland. Using SPSS statistical analysis, the results suggest that there has been little contact between police cadets and African immigrants in Finland and, as a result, mutual suspicion is rife. In addition, the relationship between the police cadets and African immigrants is quite different across age, gender, education, and language skills of police cadets. In other words these variables operated in unexpected ways, which run directly counter to well-accepted assumptions regarding the police and African immigrants in Finland. These police cadets' views could offer us an important insight into the larger police force