The Police has as its main task to prevent crime and increase safety and security. This cannot be done by the police force itself, but in collaboration with the surrounding society. An important purpose with the Swedish police reform in 2015 was that police work should be conducted closer to the citizens and the civil society. Essential in this policy is local policy work with a focus on cooperation regarding crime prevention with both the municipalities and other actors. The cooperation on crime in the local society is a way to increase knowledge and contact with the citizens and members of different groups and associations. This type of cooperation is scientifically a relatively unexplored area in Sweden.

 The main objective with this study is to map out the different types of cooperation between the police of the civil society to understand pros and cons with this cooperation. 

RQ1: In what way do the police get use of the cooperation with the civil society?

RQ2: When and in what form is the cooperation conducted?

RQ3: How is the cooperation conducted?

In order to get a deeper understanding of different forms of collaborations this study is geographical delimited to one police area in the south of Sweden – Kronoberg/Kalmar. It is based on interviews with representatives of the Swedish police authority at the local level and non-profit associations cooperating with the police and participatory observation.

The empirical findings show a wide range of cooperation forms such as established organizational cooperation and individual based connections. The results also suggest a tendency towards four ideal types of cooperation, which can be patterned in variations of:

Function based collaboration, situation based collaboration, person based collaboration and 

organization based collaboration. There are also indications that the importance of this cooperation, stressed in policy documents and by the management, is not always shared with the police working within the operational activities. Implications and usefulness of these findings to future practice will be further explored.