Given the international trend in police education in recent decades towards a more academic focus, the startingpoint for this article was the fact that only a few police officers with a PhD stay on in the Swedish policeorganisation. Thus the objective of the study was to investigate the role exit processes of police officers with a PhD,with special emphasis on organisational opportunities and obstacles in the relationship between higher educationand the police organisation as a pre-profession. This relationship has been described as a difficult combinationinvolving ‘two-world thinking’. Police officers with a PhD were interviewed about their experiences from researchtraining and careers after dissertation. Inspired by the role exit model developed by Ebaugh, the study identifieda role exit process that was caused by the inability of the police organisation to manage and integrate academiccompetence inside the organisation. At the same time, the graduate police officers discovered an alternativelabour market outside the police profession, often in police education itself, which alleviated their professionalphantom pain. The involuntary nature of the role exit, given the graduates’ wish to remain relevant in the policeorganisation, prolonged a process that was emotionally painful to them.

Diskussionen om studenters akademiska litteracitet har varit framträdande de senaste åren. Mindre uppmärksamhet har ägnats åt professionsspråket, en aspekt som är central för profes-sionsutbildningar och därmed en betydande del av högre utbildning. Frågan om hur studenter tillägnar sig professionsspråk är således central i en pedagogisk kontext. I detta paper presen-terar vi ett antal undervisningsmoment från polisutbildningen där lärandet av olika former av polisiärt professionsspråk –kroppsspråk, tal och skrift – står i fokus. Lärandemomenten som presenteras har kollektivt arbetats fram över tid och är utvalda av polislärare som uppfattar dem som goda exempel på undervisning i professionsspråk.Texten är skriven inom ramen för projektet Utveckling av kritisk språkfärdighet för samhälls-bärande professioner där polisutbildningen från Linnéuniversitetet (LNU), sjuksköterskeutbi-ldningen vid Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH) och officersutbildningen vid Sjöstridsskolan i Karlskrona (SSS) har medverkat (Universitets- och högskolerådet Dnr: 1.1.1-00399-2023). I projektet har vi inventerat säkerhetsrisker i yrkesutövningen som brister i professionsspråket kan medföra samt undersökt former för lärande av professionsspråk.

In 1908, the first women to join the Swedish police, two nurses and a clerk, were hired as police assistants. The printed sources constituting the empirical material, used to describe and analyze the entry of these first women into the Swedish police, show that their level of education and socio-economic status surpassed that of most police officers at the time. Despite this, they were lower paid and lacked promotion opportunities. Their work centered on women and children, shaping gendered aspects and reflecting international trends of policing. Although well-received, female police assistants remained limited in number and had little impact on policing. This paper contributes both to historical police research at national and international levels and general women’s history relating to female entry into male professions, while promoting understanding of women’s roles in contemporary policing by linking past insights to present contexts.

Once upon a time, the Swedish police education was purely vocational, owned and operated by the Police themselves. Since the year 2000, it is a contract education owned by the Police and run by academic institutions. The result of the contemporary setting is a hybrid of vocational training and academic education, leading to tensions between educational traditions and organizational logics. In this setting the police organization is sometimes accused of being uninterested in academic knowledge. However, initiatives to strengthen academic knowledge of police officers have been identified from both the academic system and from the Swedish Police. The initiatives contribute to what we interpret as an academic densification of the Swedish police education.

This presentation is based on interviews with individuals holding key positions in Swedish police education, combined with analysis of documents related to police education. It consists of three interconnected parts: i), the story of how the Swedish police education has been academically densified is outlined, ii), the arguments for and against academically educated police officers and a full-scale academization of police education are identified, and iii), the field of stakeholder positions towards the academization of Swedish police education is identified. The outcome of the presentation provides insight into who holds the privilege of problem formulation and how it influences the design of contemporary Swedish police education.

The notion that the police need to work in interorganizational partnerships has been well-established for decades, although the task has proved difficult. Based on interviews with representatives from strategically selected CSOs, this study examines encouraging and hindering factors for collaboration with the police. It also shows that the statements of the three CSOs echo previous research where the police is involved. The study concludes that firstly, the police must recognize the CSOs as trustworthy and consider their activities to be of police interest. Secondly, the CSOs must manage to penetrate the police organization's physical and cultural boundaries in order to offer their services. Thirdly, a division of labour must be established where the benefits of collaboration are evident for both parties. Fourthly, collaboration must be organizationally institutionalized. It is worth noting that not all CSOs strive for closer collaboration; some prefer to keep a distance.

What characterizes the kind of people recruited to police work? How are they shaped bypolice education and socialisation into the profession? These questions are addressed bythe longitudinal, cross-national comparative project Recruitment, Education and Careers inthe Police (RECPOL). The project made it possible to study and compare police students’and candidates’ values and attitudes, both initially and over time, how they changed and/orsustained during the education and training and after graduation – as police officers.

The first RECPOL-study started in August 2010. Seven European countries collected dataduring four moments in time: at the beginning and at the end of police education, after threeand after six years in the workplace. The findings over the period during police educationwere published in The Making of a Police Officer. Comparative Perspectives on PoliceEducation and Recruitment (Bjørgo & Damen 2020). The overall results showed that policestudents are strikingly similar across different types of police education. The national contextseems to play a more important role than the type of police education system.

There have been significant changes in several police educations in Europe in the lastdecade – since the first data were collected in RECPOL. Therefore, an initiative has beentaken by representatives from Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Catalonia, and Norway, to startup a new RECPOL study once again. We intend to present an overview and some specificsfrom this project at the conference. We ask the audience to participate in a discussion aboutvaluable topics and research questions for the next round, and we hope to welcomeexpressions of interest from other countries or universities to join the project

The Swedish police has been categorized as a pre-profession (Brante, 2014) due to a lack of a clearly defined scientific base but also with a substantive and organizational approach to the academic system. By interviewing all Swedish police officers with a PhD, this study aims to investigate aspects of the relationship between academic and professional logic of policing, something that has been described as “two worlds thinking” (Hallenberg, 2012). The narratives of the PhD-police officers embody the pioneering work of such two worlds thinking. With some exceptions, the interviewees experience difficulties in converting their doctorate into careers within the Swedish Police Authority (SPA). Their research and acquired skills are perceived as uninteresting, and sometimes threatening. This generates friction and exclusion. Instead, usability is identified in relation to the police training and/or within the academic system.

 Two analytical tracks that indicate incompatibility between the police organisation and academic knowledge has been identified.

1.      Almost all interviewees express phantom pains after leaving the profession. This has been interpreted as a type of disengaging process that has been described in social exit-processes (Ebaugh, 1988).

2.      The lacking ability to transform academic knowledge and skills into something useful indicate an organization where such knowledge can be interpreted as organizational pollution (Douglas, 1966), uncapable to be integrated as “pure”. By complementing the interviewees with an analysis of their PhD-thesis, the actions taken by the SPA can be understood as a procedure of social closure (Weber, 1922) where the definition of the police profession is protected.

As an important pillar of building sustainable peace after protractedviolent conflict, security sector reform (SSR) has the objective to preparestate security actors, who often have been active conflict participants,for work within the frameworks of democracy, adherence to human andcivil rights, and civilian rule. A major component of SSR is the re-trainingand re-education of local police to improve their relationship with thelocal communities. This relationship has often been severely strained byhuman rights abuses committed by police against community membersduring the conflict, and it continues to be put to the test in fragile post-accord environments by persisting high levels of violence. However,research on how to improve that relationship, particularly from abottom-up  perspective,  remains  scarce.  This  study  analyses  thedynamics of the relationship between the police and communities inthe transition period from war to peace in Colombia, a countrytormented by continued violence even after the signing of the 2016peace agreement that was to set an end to the country’s decades ofinternal conflict. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted duringthe fall of 2019, it applies the theoretical lens of the relational peaceframework that approaches peace in terms of relationships betweendifferent sets of interdependent actors. Thefindings indicate that therelationship between the communities and the police has not reachedsatisfactory levels of relational peace, suggesting a set-back in security-related peacebuilding. The paper concludes with recommendations,including from interviewees, on how to improve that relationship.

AbstractScenario-based exercises employing fgurants are frequently used in vocationaleducation worldwide. The purpose of these exercises is to help the students developpractical knowledge and skills on their way to becoming professional practitioners.While previous research often concentrates on the exercises’ design, level of realismand complexity, there is a knowledge gap regarding the use of fgurants, not leastwhen it comes to advantages and disadvantages with diferent fgurant types. The aimof this study is to investigate how, why and in what type of exercises fgurants are usedin Swedish police education. The empirical material derives from interviews with teachers, students, and fgurants from fve Swedish police education programmes, focusingon the interviewees’ experience of the use of internal, external, and semi-external fgurants in distinctive exercises. The three fgurant types were attributed specifc efectson the implementation of exercises and were perceived as having diferent advantagesand disadvantages depending on the purpose of each exercise, the impact being particularly noticeable in relation to levels of realism, permissive environments, the counterpart perspective, safety concerns, feedback, and simulation competence. The choiceof fgurant type has an equally important impact on the outcome of the scenariosas other factors, and there is a need for more research on the use of fgurants in relationto student learning.