Academic drift within the police education and the police profession in Sweden

In this presentation we outline a research project that focus on two different police student groups who contribute to an influx of academic knowledge, resources and experience into the Swedish police training and everyday police work. The first group consists of professional police officers who have chosen to study recently established courses in the academic discipline police work on bachelor or master level. The second group are police students who have already pursued and obtained an academic degree and who subsequently apply for and are admitted to police training. The purpose of this project is to design a study that provides in-depth knowledge of who these students are and in what ways they contribute to academicize a police training and police profession that isn’t fully integrated in the academic system. Theoretically, we use the concept of academic drift to understand how professional education and work on different levels is affected and resemble characteristics and organizational principles from the academic system. In this project we focus on the student-level of academic drift in order to understand how students with academic experience and resources relate to police training and work and how police organizations handles and utilizes such experiences and resources.