Abstract
There is a debate in current scholarship regarding whether or not education and training is an effective tool to change police officers’ conduct. Compared to the United States, Sweden has longer training for officers who experience 2 years of academic training and 6 months of practical training. The Swedish police training is also, contrary to the American training, standardized. This paper aims to investigate how Swedish officers value, evaluate and manage knowledge when making decisions. To examine this further 27 qualitative interviews were conducted with 14 male and 13 female Swedish police officers during 2018. The interviews were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis in both English and Swedish to uncover themes and codes. Findings suggest that police officers utilize experience, seniority, and gut feeling when valuing, evaluating and managing knowledge. Furthermore, the results imply that certain types of knowledge are valued differently by officers. These findings can inform how and if education can be used as a tool to potentially change how officers in the US and other countries make their decisions.
Highlights
Police officers make many decisions every day
This study aims to address this gap in the literature but qualitatively analyze how 27 Swedish police officers describe what knowledge is most valuable in policing and what type of knowledge they use when making professional decisions
I conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with Swedish police officers to understand more about officers and their professional knowledge
Summary
Police officers make many decisions every day. Officers decide what information goes into police reports, which car they should stop in the street, and whom they should arrest. Many things may guide these decisions, one of the essential factors is knowledge. Police officers make decisions that impact individuals. Extensive scholarship highlights that officers make biased decisions that negatively impact non-whites (Brunson, 2007; Quinton, 2015; Vito et al, 2017) and stigmatized populations such as individuals with a prior criminal history (Tillyer, 2014). Education and training are some of the tools that are often suggested to try and minimize the biased decisions officers make (Krameddine and Silverstone, 2015). Empirical evidence provides mixed support for the effectiveness of education to change officers’ behavior (Malmin, 2012; Bruns and Bruns, 2015)
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