1. COULD COMMUNITY POLICING THAT HAS WORKED ‘THERE’ALSO
WORK ‘HERE’?: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EXPERIENCES OF
NATIONAL POLICY AND STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATIONS IN THE FIELD
OF COMMUNITY POLICING AND COMMUNITY SAFETY IN RURAL
BRITAIN AND FINLAND
MSc Terrorism, Security & Policing
Department of Criminology
University of Leicester
September 2013
Tuomas Sarpakunnas
20,242 words

2. ABSTRACT
This dissertation is a literature review that compares British and Finnish policy
and strategy implementations in the field of community policing and community safety,
and assesses whether the British practices could be transferred to the Finnish context. In
addition to a broader analysis of the national policies, it examines how the subsequent
strategies that were initially developed to address urban crime-related problems have been
adapted to the needs of rural communities influenced by the societal structures and
processes prevalent in distinctive contexts. The analysis concentrates on the experiences
of implementing the philosophy of community policing in Britain and Finland, and
demonstrates why it has been a difficult mission. It describes how the distinctive
strategies around community safety have evolved from an inter-agency partnership
approach tackling crime and disorder towards a more holistic solution to the concerns of
the British and Finnish communities. Moreover, the comparison deals with varying
contexts, dissimilar problems and diverging strategies of community policing and safety
in rural communities in the two countries. The dissertation argues that, in addition to
undemonstrated impacts on crime and inadequate consideration of the distinctive
contexts, the countries have contrasting visions of community-based security provision
that has a fundamental effect on the national policy and strategy implementations.
Furthermore, it concludes that in order to produce efficient strategies for improving the
security of rural communities, greater attention has to be paid to the significance of
societal structures and processes of distinctive contexts and their research.
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3. ...............................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION 4
............................................................1.1 Approach to the Research Problem 5
............................1.2 Defining Community Policing and Community Safety 6
.................................................................................1.3 Dissertation Structure 8
..............................................................................................2 METHODOLOGY 9
3 CHAPTER I: Experiences of British and Finnish Community Policing and
......................................................................................................Safety 11
.............3.1 The Emergence of Community Policing in Britain and Finland 11
...................................................3.2 Developing British Community Safety 17
................................3.3 The Finnish Model of Local Security Management 22
....................3.4 The Diverging Visions of Community Policing and Safety 28
.....................................4. CHAPTER II: Experiences of Rural Implementations 33
.....................................................4.1 The Idyll of Countryside Community 33
...............................4.2 Context of Social Life in Rural Britain and Finland 36
...............................4.3 The Representations of Rural Crime and Insecurity 40
...............................4.4 Community Policing and Safety in the Countryside 44
...............................................................................................5 CONCLUSIONS 50
...........................................................................................................REFERENCES 53
............................................................................................................APPENDICES 60
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4. 1 INTRODUCTION
The initial impulse for this comparative examination of Finnish and British
community policing and safety was given by the public comments by the Finnish
National Police Commissioner Mikko Paatero, who suggested that the Finnish law needs
rapid alterations that would allow the use of volunteer neighbourhood patrols – such as
those in the UK – to help the police by providing additional eyes and ears in the rural
Finland (Yle News, 2012). This provocative comment can be interpreted as a cry of worry
related to the ongoing reform that is downsizing the public police service in Finland and
leaving the rural communities more alone in terms of security and safety than they
already are (Virta, 2013). Moreover, it is true that the safety of the Finnish countryside
has to be built on different cornerstones than urban safety because the distances in rural
areas are long, the availability of rural public and private services is decreasing, and the
people are migrating from rural areas to urban centres along with the centralised services
(Oinas, 2012). Thus, new means for everyday security have to be discovered for the rural
communities that are at the same time increasingly frightened of the unpredictability of
the post-modern world (Oinas, 2012). Nevertheless, these comments published by the
Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle News, 2012) sparked further questions about the
comparability of policies and the transferability of practices between different countries.
Namely, what have the British and Finnish community policing and safety policies
achieved, how the subsequent practices differ from each other, and could the experiences
of community policing and safety in the British countryside provide examples for useful
new practices in the Finnish rural areas?
This comparative analysis argues that the British and Finnish contexts of
community policing and safety have involved relatively similar policy and strategy
formations, although for different reasons. The subsequent practices have had diverging
evolutions that have had outcomes, whose efficacy has been contested in both countries.
The countries have very dissimilar visions about the provision of community policing and
safety, which has a fundamental impact on its outcomes, and due to these findings the
practices of community-based security provision in rural Britain are not offering any
useful applications for the security problems in the Finnish countryside. Consequently,
after an examination of policy outcomes in the prevalent contexts, the suggestions of
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5. Police Commissioner Paatero (Yle News, 2012) about possible policy transfers regarding
volunteer neighbourhood patrols need be assessed critically.
1.1 Approach to the Research Problem
The research problem of this dissertation is approached from an assertion that,
nowadays, communitarian ideas are strongly rooted in strategies of crime control and
security governance, and the rhetoric on the subject is filled with notions of community,
neighbourhood and localness that are combined with the trends of crime and disorder
reduction, situational and social prevention, and partnership approach (Hughes, 2007).
The shift of focus in crime control from offenders to offences has been a topic of a vast
amount of research in Britain but mainly in the context of urban settings, because the
crime problem has primarily been an urban problem and a less significant issue in rural
areas (Gilling and Pierpoint, 1999). Therefore, there is also less knowledge about the
varying community approaches to policing and provision of safety in sparsely populated
areas, and that is the very domain where this dissertation is seeking to contribute.
Comparative criminological research and transnational criminal justice policy
transfer between Western countries has produced both policy divergence and convergence
in the field of community safety across Europe (Moore and Millie, 2011). Moore and
Millie (2011) claim that, in this field, the language and practices are more or less
borrowed from the policies of other countries, which can be problematic as transferred
policies are inevitably affected by local political cultures. Furthermore, the comparative
criminological research has been dominated by researchers embracing nomothetic
generalisations that originate in American criminology (Edwards and Hughes, 2005). As a
result, this thinking of ‘what works’ has been transferred to the UK and continental
Europe as the generalisations of crime patterns, victimisation and other criminological
objects are believed to provide ‘...unbiased knowledge for policy discussions within and
across nations’ (Bennett, 2004: 10 as cited in Edwards and Hughes, 2005: 348).
Nevertheless, a problem of the nomothetic approach is that generalisations are inadequate
in producing causal explanations that would fit into any given universal context but are
strongly influenced by the American notion of individualism that does not take the social
structures and settings of crime into account (Edwards and Hughes, 2005). Moreover, a
counter-reaction to these generalisations are idiographic descriptions that emphasise the
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6. unique localness and spontaneity of social situations. Nonetheless, this indigenousness
has been considered an overly specific approach that tries to exclude external influence
and therefore is not any better comparison technique than the broad generalisations
(Edwards and Hughes, 2005).
As a solution to this trade-off between two extremes, Edwards and Hughes (2005)
are advocating a comparative criminology that accepts the existence of a complex social
life in a context that has a unique geographical and historical experience. In other words,
this comparative approach does not approve strict experimental conditions that are
essential in natural sciences but supports an interpretive understanding of social relations
that are in a continuous state of change and alteration according to social events (Hughes,
2007). Moreover, according to Hughes (2007), the political, economical, cultural and
other societal circumstances do not only form a scene for criminological experiments but
are constitutive of such activities. Hence, the context of social life is constructed of past
and present societal circumstances, and subsequent structures and processes of social
relations developed between and within national borders (Hughes, 2007). Consequently,
Edwards and Hughes (2005) replace nomothetic universality and idiographic uniqueness
with the examination of context in the present-day comparative criminological research.
Making use of this perspective to comparison, this dissertation compares
experiences of implementing policies and strategies of community policing and
community safety in Britain and Finland. Beneath the analysis lies a curiosity of learning
how the strategies have fitted to the purpose and how they address the needs of different
contexts across communities in these countries. First of all, the dissertation asks what the
experiences of government policy and strategy implementations reveal about the general
approaches to the continuously developing concepts of community policing and
community safety in these two countries. Moreover, it narrows the focus down by asking
what the experiences in rural settings convey about the significance of context in the
implementation process.
1.2 Defining Community Policing and Community Safety
The term ‘community policing’ has many meanings and often features in the
discussion about contemporary public policing. However, there are varying definitions for
it ranging from ‘... merely anything which improves relations and trust between the police
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7. and local community’ to various specifications (Crawford, 1998: 146). Furthermore, some
consider it to be an overly general term that does not provide anything specific in order to
be useful in the discussion about policing (Wycoff, 1988 as cited in Palmiotto, 2011).
Community policing is commonly referred to as a policing philosophy that seeks to create
a new kind of relationship between the police and the public in relation to traditional law
enforcement. In addition to a philosophy, it is also an organisational strategy (Crawford,
1998). As such, it is sometimes considered to be synonymous with ‘problem-oriented
policing’ (Palmiotto, 2011). However, an accurate characterisation of different policing
strategies by Scott (2008) reveals that community policing – as well as other innovative
policing strategies such as ‘intelligence-led policing’ – are separate strategies based on
organisational theories. Hence, community policing is about the nature of the police-
community relationship, communication habits of the police in this relationship, and ‘...
the relative responsibilities of police and citizens toward a safe and orderly society ...’,
whereas problem-oriented policing focuses on solving problems with thorough analysis
and specified interventions (Scott, 2008: 177).
Having said that, attention shall also be paid to Schneider (2009), who defines
community policing as involving not only a reliance on effective co-operation with the
communities they serve and a transformed organisation that has become part of the
community, but also a problem-oriented approach to local crime problems. Additionally,
Weatheritt (1993, as cited in Crawford, 1998) has provided three common characteristics:
the organisation of the police foot patrols to permanent geographic areas, the
establishment of partnerships in order to prevent crime, and the provision of opportunities
for citizen consultation about their worries related to crime and policing. Furthermore,
Stipak (1995: 115 as cited in Palmiotto, 2011: 215) suggested a very useful definition:
'Community policing is a management strategy that promotes the joint responsibility of
citizens and police for community safety, through working partnerships and interpersonal
contacts'. Consequently, in order to provide a sufficient perspective on the topic, this
dissertation will consider community policing as philosophy that takes all the above
characteristics into account.
As community policing is a contested and broad term for various community-
oriented policing initiatives, ‘community safety’ is not an unambiguous concept either. It
refers to crime prevention policies, strategies and programmes that combine inter-agency
approach with the needs of regenerated sense of local community (Crawford, 1998).
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8. According to the UN, these partnership efforts creating safer communities must ‘... bring
together those with responsibility for planning and development, for family, health,
employment, and training, housing and social services, leisure activities, schools, the
police, and the justice system, in order to deal with the conditions that generate
crime’ (United Nations, 1991 as cited in Crawford, 1998: 32). However, due to linguistic
reasons, the term community safety itself is not familiar in Finland but the activity that it
compasses is. Thus, this dissertation will use the term ‘local security management’ when
addressing community safety in Finland (Virta, 2002a). On the other hand, in England
and Wales, the term community safety has a strong association with the concept of ‘crime
and disorder reduction’ due to the governmental policy developments. In the 1990s both
of the terms were officially introduced ‘... to signify a comprehensive and targeted local
approach to crime control ...’ (Hughes and Edwards, 2005: 19). Nevertheless, a tension
underlies these two concepts as crime and disorder reduction is constrained to the local
delivery of services dealing with crime and disorder, whereas community safety is about
addressing local risks and harms defined by the community as well as improving citizens‘
quality of life according to their needs for safety (Gilling and Schuller, 2007; Hughes and
Edwards, 2005). In spite of differing defining elements, this dissertation will take both
natures of the term into account when examining the strategies of local security
management and community safety in Finland and Britain.
1.3 Dissertation Structure
This dissertation constitutes of two main chapters that are preceded by a brief
description of methodology. The first chapter will address the first part of the research
problem and discusses the origins of community policing as well as examines its initial
implementations in Britain and Finland. Additionally, the chapter analyses some
experiences and implications of policies of British community safety and Finnish local
security management, and assesses their efficacy. The chapter ends with an analysis of the
distinctive visions of community policing and safety between these countries. The second
chapter addresses the second part of the research problem through the framework of the
idyll of countryside community and the analysis of the distinctive British and Finnish
contexts as well as the discussion about the rural crime problem and the solutions to it.
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9. 2 METHODOLOGY
This dissertation employs a focused comparative analysis in which experiences are
presented from both Britain and Finland (Pakes, 2010). According to Pakes (2010), the
similar the societies under study are, the easier it is to isolate the effecting factors within
them in the focused comparison. Despite markably diverging historical backgrounds and
some institutional differences such as differing polities and judicial systems, the
membership of the European Union is a strong link between Britain and Finland.
Moreover, the past policy transfer in the field of policing and crime prevention from other
Western countries to Finland, and the general development of Finnish security
governance towards common European ideals provides a considerable foundation for
focused comparison (Virta, 2002a; 2013). Additionally, this comparison is inspired by the
author’s experience of having lived in both of these countries.
However, there is a danger in employing comparative research methods in that the
issues in question can be assessed inadequately by not considering different perspectives
(Pakes, 2010). Pakes (2010) argues that examination of the source material related to
crime control needs to be sufficient and objective. Additionally, certain attention has to be
paid to cultural specificity of language, as there can be linguistic differences between
English and Finnish that can alter the meaning of a term depending on the specific word
used (Pakes, 2010). For example, the term ‘community’ that is yhteisö in Finnish, does
not necessarily have similar connotation in the Finnish language and, consequently,
practices related to community safety in the UK might deliver a different message when
applied in Finland (Crawford, 2009). However, as Vogler (1996, as cited in Pakes, 2010)
has argued, while achieving a complete understanding of a foreign society is impossible,
it still does not prevent societies from trying to learn from each others.
Conducting a literature review was a purposefully chosen methodological strategy
for this dissertation, because there is an extensive collection of literature that covers
British community policing and safety policies and practices produced by criminologists.
Moreover, additional literature has focused on the effects that these policies have in the
countryside although initially created for dealing with crime in the crowded urban space.
Furthermore, Finnish academics have studied substantially the developments in Finnish
community policing and local security management in urban and rural settings. An
alternative option for research strategy would had been a comparison of policies and
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10. practices of community policing between Finland and Britain with empirical means, but
the focus on broad experiences of strategic choices and the chosen comparative
perspective meant that empirical research would have been too great a task to be
performed within the limits of the available resources and time that were reserved for this
dissertation.
The nature of this literature review is narrative which, according to Wakefield
(2011), provides a good foundation for the comparative analysis. It is suitable for the
broad field of community policing and safety and offers holistic but still comprehensive
interpretations that permits to see the big picture while allowing comparisons between
diverse perspectives that the British and Finnish contexts involve. However, narrative
reviews have their shortcomings, too. Essentially, Wakefield (2011) claims that it does not
clearly specify review methodology, which can, for instance, lead to unstructured
selection of literature. Furthermore, the style leaves room for variation in quality of the
used source literature, as the methodology does not have a quality criteria. Consequently,
the narrative review is weak in preventing reviewer bias (Wakefield, 2011). Nevertheless,
the source literature for this dissertation was gathered utilising physical and electronic
book and journal collections in the University of Leicester library. Additionally, some
literature covering Finnish community policing and safety was also obtained through the
Helsinki University library and the web databases maintained by the Police College of
Finland and the Ministry of the Interior. Furthermore, this dissertation is unlikely to
cause harm to any individual or a group of people, as it is a broad analysis of past and
existing policy implications.
A final methodological note should be made concerning the analysis of the British
policies and practices. As British academics (Gilling, Hughes, Bowden, Edwards, Henry
and Topping, 2013) argue, the ‘anglophone model’ of community safety is not
homogenous. That is, the policy formation and strategy development has been slightly
different between the nations within the United Kingdom. For example, Henry (2009)
argue that the evolution of community safety in Scotland should be considered separate
from that in England and Wales. In order to keep the comparison between Britain and
Finland manageable, this dissertation will focus on the experiences of policies
implemented in England and Wales. Therefore, ‘Britain’ in this dissertation will primarily
refer to England and Wales.
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11. 3 CHAPTER I: Experiences of British and Finnish Community Policing and
Safety
3.1 The Emergence of Community Policing in Britain and Finland
During the past few decades, police departments around the world have been keen
on implementing the philosophy of community policing, which has its roots in the United
States. The first intervention utilising this approach emerged in New York City in the first
decade of the 20th century. According to the initial idea, the low-ranking police officers
‘... should be in position of social importance and public value’ and would be the key
players providing law-enforcement-related information for the citizens about their living
environment, serving as a tool for the police to gain respect from the public (Palmiotto,
2011: 211). Thus, it was reasoned that the approach would make the police receive more
reports of violations of law from the public because of improved police-citizen
relationship. Furthermore, the idea of Woods was that police officers should be
responsible for the improvement of social conditions in their patrolling area and
participate in the improvement of the city neighbourhoods. The new philosophy was
praised publicly in the newspapers at the time but vanished in the 1930s and 1940s when
the Great Depression and the World War II put community relations aside and reinforced
the model of punitive crime control (Palmiotto, 2011). However, community relations
started to be valued again as a response to the increased urban disorder and crime in the
1960s and 1970s (Palmiotto, 2011). According to Tilley (2008a), the example of the US
motivated the British to transfer community policing to Britain as a solution to the poor
community relations of the police in the 1970s. Although community policing has
reached a status of a key policing principle in the US, in Britain it has not. In Britain the
philosophy was confronted with resisting institutional barriers and limited interest of the
public (Crawford, 1998; Tilley, 2008a).
As in Britain, community policing in Finland was also initially a transferred policy
that has not fitted into the culture of local policing very easily. According to Virta (1998),
in the 1970s and 1980s the few community policing interventions in Finland were
experimental and disorganised, and the philosophy was seen merely as having a function
of public relations. Despite the first official instructions of community policing that were
given in 1978 by the Ministry of Interior of Finland, ten years later there was only 160
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12. community police officers in the country which meant only two per cent of the whole
police force. As in Britain, the philosophy faced strong resistance among police officers
who did not regard community policing as ‘true’ police work (Virta, 2002a). Later in the
mid-1990s, Finnish police managers who visited the US, the Netherlands, Belgium and
the UK, brought a mixture of ideas constituting of the Western community policing and
problem-oriented policing to Finland (Virta, 2002a). In the process, the philosophy was
given a Finnish term lähipoliisitoiminta which stands for ‘proximity policing’ instead of
translating it to mean ‘community policing‘ precisely (Holmberg, 2005). This reflects the
Finnish demand for a higher quality police force, which was the initial reason for
transferring the philosophy. These demands were discovered by the police forces
themselves in the 1990s and, according to their own surveys, the public wanted more foot
patrols on the streets whereas local authorities and other decision makers expected better
co-operation with the police (Virta, 2002a). That is, the police were expected to be where
most needed when most needed.
In Britain, the institutional barriers that made it difficult for community policing to
achieve its goals emerged due to the strong traditional working culture of the police in
terms of work practices and attitudes related to the role of a police officer (Palmiotto,
2011; Tilley, 2008b). Academics (Scott, 2008; Palmiotto, 2011; Tilley, 2008b) argue that,
firstly, in addition to strong resistance towards change, the traditional culture of policing
holds a suspicion towards the public, as any individual could be a potential criminal.
Secondly, the suspicion is backed up by a ‘macho’ attitude associated with the officer’s
role that prevents the adoption of a softer community policing attitude and creates
reluctance to establish a relationship with the citizens. Hence, the role of a community
police officer has not been a very calling one in the British constabularies, and officers
specialised in community policing have been largely considered among their peers as
being involved in social work rather than ‘real’ policing. Thirdly, due to these attitudes, it
is not unusual for officers to fail in presenting themselves in a trustworthy and problem-
solving manner within the neighbourhoods they are patrolling. Finally, as community
policing is also an organisational strategy that requires a decentralised structure, the
traditionally very strong hierarchical and centralised command structure of the police has
not easily adapted to the change (Scott, 2008; Palmiotto, 2011; Tilley, 2008b). Tilley
(2008; 2012) argues that the other hindrance in implementing community policing in
Britain occurred when the interest of the public towards the initiatives tended to limit only
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13. to those who already had a high trust on the police and were least in need of it. Moreover,
the citizens most in need – those who were marginalised and showing very low trust in
the police – avoided the voluntary engagement with them. Hence, for example, the public
community consultative groups in which the police and the members of community
discuss local problems and solutions to them have usually a low participation rate and
represent only a part of the community, namely, older citizens and white middle class
(Tilley, 2008a; 2012). Therefore, Tilley (2008b) asserts that community policing in
Britain has only been a supplement to traditional policing that can attract the upright
citizens to act as the eyes and ears for the authorities and alert them when necessary.
Similarly, in Finland the change in policing philosophy has been an uneasy
process mainly due to two reasons (Virta, 2002a). Firstly, according to Virta (2002a),
there was no management of change, as prioritisation of different aspects of the
philosophy was disregarded and activities such as citizen consultation or education and
foot patrolling were implemented simultaneously. Additionally, training of personnel to
the principles of community policing was inadequate, and there was no additional
resources to support the new activity along with the general police work. Consequently,
the implementation of community policing was inconsistent and resulted in parallel
models of policing where the old and the new philosophies were delivered side by side
(Virta, 2002a). Secondly, the philosophy was initially created for problems Finland did
not have. Virta (2002a) asserts that police managers were not committed to the change
because the change was not seen as mandatory due to the good relations with the public.
They understood that the essential purpose of community policing was to improve the
community-police relationship, but the relationship between the Finnish public and the
police was not poor (Virta, 2002a). On the contrary, trust on the police in the Finnish
society has traditionally been high.
According to Kääriäinen (2007), in comparison to citizens of other European
countries, Finnish people have high trust in law enforcement agencies. In his examination
of interview data from the European Social Survey 2004, he found out that Finland,
accompanied by the other Nordic countries, held the top position in a league table
constituting of 16 European countries. On a scale of zero to ten, the mean value for trust
in the police in Finland was nearly eight, whereas the UK with a mean value of around six
was placed in the middle of the table. Kääriäinen (2007) states that similar barometers
have constantly showed corresponding results for Finland. Moreover, it seems that instead
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14. of individual level explanations, such as financial insecurity and social networks, the
country-level variables related to the structure of government and its service systems are
significant explanations for the national differences in trust. That is, citizens in Finland
have trust in non-corrupt government that provides a good public welfare (Kääriäinen,
2007). However, the examination by Kääriäinen (2007) does not take other country-level
explanations into consideration, which may overlook alternative reasons for high trust in
the police. Nevertheless, in another study based on empirical data of an interview survey
about Finns’ experiences of safety and of policing, the Police Barometer 2005, Kääriäinen
(2008) found that the trust in Finland does not build entirely on the same cornerstones as
it does in the UK. In Finland, the fear of crime, victimisation, and the police-community
relationship are not strong influencers in people’s trust in the police, as has been found to
be in the UK (Allen et al., 2006 as cited in Kääriäinen, 2008). Furthermore, proximity of
the Finnish police does not increase trust, as the police is not expected to be present if
there is no problem in sight (Kääriäinen, 2008). Yet, the quality of policing perceived by
citizens seemed to have some significance but only on a general level. That is, the citizens
trust the police if the police follows the rules that have been democratically set for it as an
institution and hence serves the public interest (Kääriäinen, 2008).
The poor relationship between the police and the public that has been a central
influencer in the implementation of community policing in Britain has evidently not been
an issue in Finland and therefore community policing was essentially not the perfect
choice for a new policing philosophy. Moreover, Holmberg (2005) claims that nearly all
of the Nordic countries, namely, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark that all have
tried to implement Western community policing, have had similar experiences. However,
during the last decade or two, they all have adapted to the situation by their own means.
For example, Norwegians have changed rhetorics from ‘proximity policing’ to ‘a police
that is as present as possible’. The Danes have chosen to make use of only some
characteristics of community policing while disregarding others such as demands for high
visibility (Holmberg, 2005: 213). Thus, Holmberg (2005) hastily suggests that community
policing is disappearing from the Nordic policing, and that it had already vanished from
the Finnish police language. Nevertheless, this has not been true – not at least in the
Finnish context. The misjudgement may be due to lack of examination of Finnish
literature on the subject, as Holmberg (2005) has not taken the strategic repositioning of
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15. community policing within the emerged model of local security management into
account.
According to Virta (2002b), the Finnish community policing strategy that was
published by the Finnish police administration within the Ministry of the Interior in 1998
emphasised problem-oriented policing that answers local needs by preventing crime in
co-operation with other authorities, businesses and citizens. Hence, in strategic thinking,
community policing became a development process and a tool instead of being a
philosophy per se. A year later, the National Crime Prevention Programme (Ministry of
Justice, 1999) that instructed local municipalities to start local safety planning reinforced
the role of community policing and embedded it in the new model of local security
management. Consequently, Finnish community policing was re-branded as ‘basic police
work’ and police officers became deliverers of knowledge and facilitators of partnership
working (Virta, 2002a; 2002b).
According to Tilley (2009), the British government made a fresh effort to
implement community policing philosophy into policing in the mid-2000s but this time
tried to avoid too comprehensive changes in the institution itself. Community policing
was to be delivered through establishing Neighbourhood Policing Teams in the British
constabularies. The teams would involve police officers dedicated to Neighbourhood
Policing but also Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) (Tilley, 2009). According
to Lister (2008), PCSOs, initially introduced with the Police Reform Act 2002, are under
the control of the Chief Police Officer but have only limited law enforcement powers.
Their intended reassuring role is to provide enhanced visible patrolling, decrease fear of
crime, and improve communities’ confidence in the police. Additionally, PCSOs are
hoped to take part in enforcement duties by monitoring their patrolling area and engaging
in and dealing with minor disorder as well as anti-social behaviour (Lister, 2008).
Nevertheless, it is argued that PCSOs were created as a counter-mechanism to the
pluralisation of policing. The public police can be seen as extending its family in defence
against the increasing private security market that has been taking over the field of
uniformed security provision since the 1990s (Innes, 2005). PCSOs are, thus, the
authorities’ effort to keep ‘... policing within the police’ (Lister, 2008: 43). However, it is
argued that a process of professionalisation is institutionalising PCSOs as ‘junior law
enforcers’ that are increasingly used in various policing tasks such as traffic enforcement,
crime scene preservation, and stop and search tasks instead of sole Neighbourhood
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16. Policing duties (Lister, 2008; Merritt, 2010). Consequently, this might hamper the
implementation of the whole Neighbourhood Policing strategy in the long-term.
The ability of Neighbourhood Policing to reassure public and improve
community-relations was tested with the National Reassurance Policing Programme
(NRPP), whose intention was to systematically evaluate the strategy before wider
implementation (Innes, 2005). According to Innes (2005), the state-sponsored programme
evaluation involved researchers from the University of Surrey whose task was to develop
theoretical and empirical evidence, and police professionals in each of the eight
participating constabularies were responsible for transforming the research findings into
operational models and practices. Additionally, the process and outcomes were evaluated
by Home Office researchers (Innes, 2005). In addition to analysing the significance of
visible patrolling by PCSOs and sworn officers, the NRPP tested the problem-solving
process that included identification of public priorities about local crime and disorder, and
targeted policing to deal with them (Quinton and Tuffin, 2007). The test data was
gathered from the programme locations and comparison sites, which were chosen in order
to gain significant results from both urban and rural areas as well as affluent and deprived
communities. In addition to police statistics, data for demonstrating the impact of
Neighbourhood Policing was gathered through telephone survey of 300 respondents in
each test locations, and a follow-up survey was conducted twelve months later. The
programme also involved analysis of policing processes in test locations and was
conducted through semi-structured interviews of police staff and community members
(Quinton and Tuffin, 2007).
Quinton and Tuffin (2007) argue that despite some research limitations – the short
research period, non-random test site selection, the matching of comparison sites was
based on very limited factors, and all survey samples were not entirely statistically
significant – that can affect the evaluation generalisability, the programme evidence
suggested that the short-term results corresponded to the aims of Neighbourhood
Policing. The results showed that public perceptions of crime and disorder changed
positively, fear of crime decreased, and Neighbourhood Police Teams increased the
familiarity of police in the test locations. Additionally, there was evidence of greater
public confidence in the police (Quinton and Tuffin, 2007). However, according to Tilley
(2008b), a subsequent study on the impact of Neighbourhood Policing Teams has not
provided such promising results, which reminds of the disappointing experiences of
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17. community policing interventions during previous decades. Nevertheless, there is still
optimism around Neighbourhood Policing that it could deliver adequate problem-solving
and build bridges between the police and the community (Tilley, 2008b). Consequently,
until more research on the effects and impact of this updated strategy of British
community policing is available, it remains uncertain whether or not Neighbourhood
Policing has been successful in overcoming the institutional obstacles and winning the
British public over.
These developments discussed in this section present a good example of the policy
transfer from different countries without thoroughly considering the giving and receiving
contexts. For example, before the strategic work and specific visions of Finnish
community policing at the end of the 1990s, activity related to community policing was
based solely on transferred models (Virta, 2012). Virta (2002a) suggests that the Finnish
practitioners responsible for gathering examples of policies on policing from abroad
clung to models and strategies that were popular in American, British and other cultures
they visited. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, the anglophone world itself has
been suffering from universalising explanations that have not taken local factors into
account (Hughes, 2007). Hence, the broadly popular model of policing based on the
improvement of community relations was perhaps seen as a self-evident solution to the
needs of Finnish authorities and the public. However, nowadays it has become more clear
that practices responding to issues in countries far away or even in other European
countries do not necessarily work in a similar way in other political and societal cultures
(e.g. northern Europe) (Moore and Millie, 2011).
3.2 Developing British Community Safety
Detached from the development around community policing, the governance of
crime saw a so-called ‘preventive turn’ in Britain between the 1970s and 1990s (Hughes,
2007). The turn involved deep concerns that conventional policing was no longer a
sufficient approach to crime control. According to Crawford (1998: 35), crime was now
seen '... as a problem within society which needs to be dealt with or managed by reducing
crime promoting conditions'. This vision emerged along the prevalent tendencies, which
assured policymakers that crime could be governed more efficiently by coordinating
public agencies and their relationship with the community (Hope, 2009). According to
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18. Crawford (1998), a similarly significant shift in relation to crime control was seen almost
150 years before when the Metropolitan Police Act was approved in 1829 establishing a
professional police force for London. The centrally managed police organisation that
would concentrate on preventing crime through the use of visible uniformed officers
replaced disorganised and unprofessional law enforcers and would deter criminals as well
as provide a solution to the increasing problem of crime in London (Crawford 1998).
Similarly in the 1970s, the central government felt that crime was getting of the control of
the police, and this time it would be the wider British society that would contribute in
crime prevention (Hope 2009).
According to academics (Crawford, 1998; Hope, 2009), in the 1980s the British
Conservative government started to support partnerships that would be established on
voluntary basis in problem locations by public agencies and other actors in common need.
The voluntariness and common need would produce a public good of security more
effortlessly than a process where one agency had the responsibility. However, the
unforced effort resulted only in experimental interventions such as the Safer Cities
Programme in 1988 (Crawford, 1998; Hope, 2009). According to Crawford (1998), the
so-called Morgan Report published in the early 1990s by a Home Office committee,
which had examined these voluntary partnerships recommended along with a number of
other suggestions that local authorities should have a statutory responsibility to develop
community safety and crime prevention with the police (Crawford, 1998). However,
Crawford (1998) claims that the Conservative government did not have clear strategic
vision of community safety, as prioritisation and distribution of responsibilities between
government departments was inconsistent and assessment of new policy implications was
unorganised. Moreover, the government did not find appropriate institutional structures to
take community safety forward but found the populist media campaigns that promoted
partnership approach among the wide public audience more intriguing (Crawford, 1998).
It was not before the election of the New Labour government that local authorities
started to co-operate with the police in partnerships through the Crime and Disorder Act
1998 that established Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) within local
authorities across England and Wales. The Act obligated the CDRPs to review local crime
and disorder problems every three years and publish the review results locally for a
consultation as well as compose a strategy that addresses identified and prioritised issues
on the grounds of the review and consultation (Phillips, 2002). In addition to the
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19. legislation, government composed the Crime Reduction Programme that promised public
funding for projects that would produce evidence-based and scientifically confirmed
practices on the field of crime prevention and community safety (Maguire, 2004).
According to Hope (2009), the new Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was considered a
success – at least in the eyes of the authorities. Firstly, it offered the central government a
way to share responsibility of crime governance whilst still having power. Secondly, the
police benefited from the new regulation because their operational independence stayed
intact but the shared responsibility also shared the accountability. Thirdly, the Act helped
to polish the deprived image of crime control and policing in the eyes of local
communities (Hope, 2009).
In terms of efficacy, outcomes of the new policy have been multifaceted, which is
reflected in the following findings. Firstly, the Home Office Policing and Reducing Crime
Unit conducted an examination of the first three-year strategy planning process at three
local CDRPs in 1999 and 2000 (Phillips, 2002). The examination looked into
achievements of these partnerships as well as the problems they encountered and how the
problems were dealt with. The research was conducted through documentation review,
partnership working group meeting observation and interviews with the working group
members (Phillips, 2002). According to Phillips (2002), the examination found that the
studied partnerships suffered from restricted funding, shortage of required skills, and
overly optimistic time limits set by the legislation. Additionally, the nature of partnership
working brought its own problems, as some participants expressed concerns of unequal
contribution in all stages of the process. However, despite the fact that it was very
common for the partnerships to compose strategies that included only objectives and
solutions that the participating agencies were already pursuing in their usual work, the
partnership approach itself received nearly unanimous support from the CDRP
participants (Phillips, 2002).
Secondly, according to Gilling (2005), the early reviews of the British partnership
approach have resulted in a requirement that CDRPs have to self-assess their processes
annually in order to demonstrate their effectiveness and value for public money. On a
very general level, the conclusions of these reviews state that partnerships need to have a
clear mission or purpose that all the agencies involved share and understand; participating
agencies and individuals need to be open and trust each other; partnership leaders and
other key roles need to be in order and appropriate structures need to be in place; and that
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20. resources, finance and substance expertise need to be managed effectively (Gilling,
2005). However, Gilling (2005) argues that despite these guidelines, partnerships fail if
they do not pay sufficient attention to the conditions where some partnerships are
successful and others are not. Moreover, partnerships have been seen as simple solutions,
whose different level structures and processes have been treated separately. The
underlying inter-level connections and causal relationships between individuals, their
organisations and the surrounding forces have not been taken into consideration in the
partnership working (Gilling, 2005).
Thirdly, Hope (2005) claims that, in general, the New Labour’s strategy to
improve community safety has been successful only superficially. According to the 2003
British Crime Survey, there was a 25 per cent decrease in overall crime in England and
Wales since 1997, which corresponds with the era of CDRPs and the Crime Prevention
Programme (Simmons and Dodd, 2003 as cited in Hope, 2005). However, research has
not been able to confirm the causality between implementation of the new policy and the
drop in crime (Hope, 2005). Although Hope (2005) considers that reduced crime may
have been a result of a general international trend or indirect effect of strong policy
discourse around community safety, he argues that during the first term of New Labour
the government’s tough attitude on crime only increased the pressure on the British
criminal justice system, as the growing prison population in relation to capita was higher
than in any other EU country in the early 2004. Moreover, the effect on general public
was less desired as British Crime Survey showed that the fear of crime was constantly
rising towards the mid-2000s (Hope, 2005).
These revelations of the British community safety developments during the late
1990s and early 2000s show evidence of the central government making strong effort to
promote universal solutions that produce fast results. For example, the funding through
the Crime Reduction Programme concentrated on short-term crime prevention
interventions in urban-based projects that were hoped to achieve outcomes rapidly by
using situational measures and targeting headline crime such as burglaries (Gilling and
Schuller, 2007). Maguire (2004) suggests that in 1999 New Labour politicians felt that the
time was right for ambitious plans and brave investments in projects that made use of
research knowledge and were exposed to scientific examination in order to produce
generalisable strategies in a short period of time. However, the expectations on the ten-
year programme were soon buried and the programme was closed after three years
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21. because of its vulnerability to political pressures raised by constantly changing crime
rates, altering programme priorities, and unwanted results from projects that suffered
from implementation failures (Maguire, 2004). According to Maguire (2004), the
Programme was successful merely in teaching about problems in project planning, time
and human resource management, and negotiations between partnership participants.
Additionally, it seems that the very nature of research-based policymaking fits poorly in
the dynamic political culture that is propelled by short-term goals and rapid reaction to
occurring events (Maguire, 2004). As academics (Maguire, 2004; Gilling and Schuller,
2007) have pointed out, the strong political steering by the central government did not
give the partnerships the room and time they would have needed to produce wanted
results.
Whether steered by the local authorities or the central government, the CDRPs are
to stay in Britain (Edwards and Hughes, 2009). This is the prevalent impression, even
though the initial strategy formation round was predominated by rush, the local
partnerships have faced high demands for efficiency that downplays the importance of
sufficient inter-level structures and processes, and the partnerships have produced varying
outcomes whose impact is disputable (Phillips, 2002; Gilling, 2005; Hope, 2005).
Nonetheless, some improvements in partnership working have taken place, including
turning the three year cycle to more continuous process where three-year strategies are
updated annually (Gilling, 2010). Another development in local partnership working is
utilisation of the National Intelligence Model that provides the police with a blueprint for
different stages of the problem-solving process (Maguire, 2012). However, the future
encompasses some challenges for the British community safety (Edwards and Hughes,
2009).
Firstly, the combination of Neighbourhood Policing and local community safety
partnerships involves some uncertainties. According to Hughes and Rowe (2007), local
communities that are in the focus of both distinctive strategy currents can produce an
unbalanced agenda for interventions that do not necessarily prioritise the objectives from
a holistic perspective. Even if the objectives for community safety and Neighbourhood
Policing are not competitive in most cases, they can form a complex network of hopes,
needs and priorities, which can be difficult to maintain in the mixed strategy field
(Hughes and Rowe, 2007). Secondly, community safety is surrounded by continuous
unpredictability, not least due to wide and deep economic crisis but also to the
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22. forthcoming impact of newly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) (Gilling et
al., 2013). The new top level role of the local PCC introduced by the Police Reform and
Social Responsibility Act 2011 brought democratically elected policymakers to the local
constabularies across England and Wales – excluding the London Metropolitan Police
area where the Mayor of London acts as the PCC – and who have the power to set
policing and community safety budgets (Gilling et al., 2013). However, election of PCCs
has raised a concern that policing will become politicised and interfered with politics
(Bridges, 2011). A more detailed but undesired vision is that while acting under political
pressure, the PCCs will reverse the community safety development since the Crime and
Disorder Act 1998 and restore the focus on reactive policing. This would set the multi-
agency approach in danger and undermine the accomplishments that have been achieved
during the past 15 years (Gilling et al., 2013).
3.3 The Finnish Model of Local Security Management
The evolution within the field of community safety in Finland has also embraced
the partnership approach, but the experiences reflect the different contexts in Finland and
Britain. As already briefly mentioned, there was an important phase in the development of
community policing and safety in Finland at the end of the 1990s. Hence, community
policing became basic work of the police and was embedded in the model of local
security management that was established through the National Crime Prevention
Programme by the Finnish National Council for Crime Prevention (NCCP) under the
Ministry of Justice (1999). The model’s master plan was a process of local safety
planning with problem identification through surveys and crime analysis, and solving the
problems by the means of local partnerships and networking (Virta, 2002a). According to
Virta (2002b), the process of local safety planning was recommended to commence in
local municipalities with network and partnership building, safety plan document writing,
and developing new projects that increase safety and security. However, the police was
assigned to conduct the process due to their knowledge and expertise on the subject, but
also because the police was the only authority that had statutory responsibility on local
level co-operation (Virta, 2002b). According to a report by the Ministry of Justice (2003),
the idea for the Programme was lent from abroad, mainly from Sweden, by the NCCP.
The corresponding Swedish programme document was translated into Finnish and
transformed to fit Finnish settings. Thus, the transformed programme was a policy that
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23. took varying aims of different branches of public administration into account and tried to
achieve a consensus. Additionally, the programme sought to involve only such crime
prevention measures that were based on knowledge and criminological theory. The
programme gained acceptance and appreciation already before it was officially confirmed
as a governmental policy in 1999 (Ministry of Justice, 2003). Nevertheless, in terms of
actual impacts of the National Crime Prevention Programme, less is known about its
efficacy and effect on crime than its influence on the structures and processes of local
security management.
In early 2002, Sirpa Virta from the University of Tampere conducted an evaluation
that reviewed 228 local safety plans – finalised or draft versions out of over 400 plans that
were in the process of completion and due by the end of the year – in order to get up-to-
date information about the implementation of the new strategy. Virta (2002) found that
the initial local safety plans suffered shortcomings in many locations. In her evaluation,
Virta (2002b) made a series of observations about the partnership and plan structures, the
safety plan problem analysis and target setting as well as the measure formation. Firstly,
the structures of local partnerships that usually involved the police, municipal authorities
and a mixture of agencies, businesses and NGOs, varied and were unique in many
locations. This means that localness with distinctive features and problems was reflected
in the partnership priorities (Virta, 2002b). Secondly, Virta (2002b) revealed that the
actual safety plan documents varied remarkably in terms of structure and quality. At its
best, the document was a finalised strategy document but in many cases it constituted of a
set of tables about problems and measures, or was only a combination of notes and
figures. Thirdly, the analysis of current crime problems was mostly based on the police
crime statistics or surveys about fear of crime. However, a portion of plans did not refer to
any analysis at all but presented a series of objectives and measures according to existing
projects (Virta, 2002b). According to Virta (2002b), this is likely to that analysis and
prioritisation had already been done before the launch of the programme but was not
considered necessary in the safety plan document.
Furthermore, Virta (2002b) found that safety plan objectives covered the whole
field of public administration and ranged from crime and disorder to accidents and other
safety issues, of which a great deal did not relate to crime at all. However, only a few
plans were focused solely on crime prevention because the majority of partnerships
considered crime and safety problems as social welfare problems such as youth substance
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24. misuse, youth social exclusion, and juvenile delinquency as well as social exclusion and
substance misuse in general (Virta, 2002b). In contrast, the concerns related purely to
security were associated with general security, public order and crime (Virta, 2002b).
Moreover, the wide perspective of concerns resulted in a broad range of measures, and the
emphasis on social crime prevention was evident (Virta, 2002b). Thus, Virta (2002b)
claimed that the safety plans lacked limitations of topics and prioritisation of objectives.
Additionally, a great deal of plan documents were short of concrete actions that
demonstrate how the local partnerships and the local security management would reach
its outcomes (Virta, 2002b). Though the review by Virta (2002b) reveals only experiences
of the early stages of the process of safety planning itself and nothing about its impacts, it
demonstrated that the safety plans that were found to have a top quality were building the
co-operation on common ground and shared understanding that safety is produced
together; involved a sufficient and broad analysis of current problems that consists of not
only crime statistics but information about local victimisation, demography and economic
structures as well as made professional use of criminological theory (Virta, 2002b).
More knowledge about local safety planning can be obtained from the following
two distinctive studies. Firstly, an evaluation of five local partnerships from
municipalities representing areas from urban to rural by Piippo, Kangas and Kääriäinen
(2006) that sought for generalisable knowledge about the efficacy of local safety planning
through examination of conditions that enable successful project implementation. The
study made use of documentation related to local security management, as well as
quantitative and qualitative data from project field worker surveys and interviews of
planning group members. Piippo et al. (2006) claim that according to project workers in
initiatives under the safety plans, the initiatives had had positive outcomes in certain
topics such as the support for youth’s own life management. Furthermore, the increased
safety in urban areas perceived by the public, the high quality of partnership working, and
the common understanding of the significance of co-operation were considered as
positive outcomes among the study respondents. However, it was discovered that the
respondents perceived the poor implementation of plans to concrete projects as a
significant shortcoming. Additionally, Piippo et al. (2006) found that the respondents
considered it to be acceptable to control youth more strictly than other citizen groups
because they were perceived not yet to have the full control over themselves. This was a
common opinion although the respondents considered it to be against the principle of
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25. indiscrimination. Moreover, a valuable observation, which has further significance was
that although local differences did reflect in the evaluated safety plans and the planning
process, they did not do so systematically. Nevertheless, the applicability of these
findings to be used as a general reference of the efficacy of safety planning is not very
high, as the respondents’ own assessments are poor indicators of efficacy and the research
examined only five partnerships (Piippo et al., 2006).
A second analysis of hand-picked implementations of local safety planning
process in three Finnish cities by Törrönen and Korander (2005) supports the following
problematic qualities of local safety planning discovered also by others (Virta, 2002b;
Piippo et al., 2006). Firstly, all the analysed safety plans lacked in defining how and with
what resources the plans are transferred into practice and, secondly, in the process of
discriminately targeting youth groups these distinctive safety plans did not take the
inviolability of the individual’s basic rights and the principle of equality into
consideration (Törrönen and Korander, 2005). Thirdly, the use of criminological theory
was done insufficiently because the routine activity theory that the plans used as a
reference were employed only partially in these cases. As the theory suggests that anyone
of us could commit a crime in right circumstances, the safety plans did not accept that
targeting certain citizen groups is therefore unprofitable (Törrönen and Korander, 2005).
Additionally, the possible effect of displacement or diversion of crime and its significance
on the fulfilment of the safety plan objectives were not adequately considered in the local
safety plans of these three cities (Törrönen and Korander, 2005).
Despite the findings about varying structures, positive perceptions and critical
shortcomings of the Finnish local security management, there is not much knowledge
about its effect on crime. As academic criminological research in Finland is '... rich in
content but thin in volume' (Lappi-Seppälä, 2012: 207), it might be the reason why there
is very little research that combines the experiences of partnership approach with
statistical information about crime. However, there is a rare exception: an analysis of two
national victimisation surveys and of police-recorded crime statistic in 1997 and 2003
(Savolainen, 2005). Savolainen (2005) examined variance of levels of victimisation and
‘community crime’ such as property crime and violent crime in locations that had activity
in terms of initiatives under the local safety plans and the National Crime Prevention
Programme. However, the analysis demonstrated a non-existent impact of the process of
local security management on community crime and, thus, Savolainen (2005) suggests
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26. that empirical evidence does not prove the programme and local safety planning to be
effective. Nevertheless, the author acknowledges the possibility that, since social
prevention measures have a strong role in Finnish crime prevention, the long-time effects
may have not yet been visible in the data (Savolainen, 2005). Consequently, more valid
research on the impact of local safety planning is desperately needed.
In spite of the undemonstrated effects on crime and its control, Törrönen and
Korander (2005) argue that local security management can incorporate at least three
different natures of crime governance and safety provision, which has some further
significance in relation to power structures in local safety planning. Firstly, a neo-
liberalist local security management is an ethos that identifies the police as the key actor
in partnership and justifies its strategy with economic competitiveness, relying strongly
on situational prevention measures and co-operative control, and unites authorities and
other actors against the target, namely, youth (Törrönen and Korander, 2005). Secondly, a
neo-leftist stance on local crime control does not emphasise the role of the police but
counts on general responsibilisation, applies a scientific approach to social and situational
prevention measures, and understands that crime problem is related to youth but does not
consider them as a threat (Törrönen and Korander, 2005). Thirdly, a combination of
communitarian and welfare ambitions about local safety sees the police as a supporter in
partnership, prefers a broad social prevention approach over situational measures in its
aims of maintaining a welfare society, and targets structural factors instead of aiming to
control any group of people (Törrönen and Korander, 2005). However, these
characterisations may not be the only existing ones, as the analysis does not cover more
than three municipalities. Nevertheless, it does signify that local security management has
had opportunities to develop independently. As the three distinctively different
approaches illustrated by Törrönen and Korander (2005) have been able to emerge as a
result of the same national policy, it demonstrates that Finnish community safety has not
been subjected to strong central government steering.
The findings of Finnish academics imply that paying attention to complex mixture
of context and its constituting factors in policy transfer is significant. In other words,
there is an unsystematic reflection of the differences in local societal structures and
processes in the safety plans (Piippo et al., 2006). Additionally, the relatively high
uniqueness of partnership structures demonstrates a strong localness of their priorities
(Virta 2002b). Moreover, the independent power to determine the ethos of local security
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27. management can result in very different approaches to crime control (Törrönen and
Korander, 2005). When combined, these observations strongly indicate that the local
political, cultural and other processes and subnational differences in societal structures
play an important role in the efficacy of local security management. Hence, it is evident
that local partnerships across Finland can end in more or less diverging local safety plans,
despite the initially converging national level guidance (Ministry of Justice, 1999).
However, this conclusion needs to be considered with caution, as the research material on
local security management is mostly theoretical but far from extensive, and empirical
evidence is based largely on researchers’ observations and people’s perceptions.
Knowledge of the Finnish local security management produced by a relatively
narrow set of research with a varying scientific quality has, however, encouraged
politicians to further develop the policies of local security management. In the mid-2000s
the responsibility of governmental steering around the topic was transferred from the
Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of the Interior, whose civil servants composed the first
Internal Security Programme in 2004 (Ministry of the Interior, 2004) in co-operation with
representatives from other governmental agencies. The programme stated that it was
filling a gap on a missing, broader inter-agency policy that develops a long-term objective
for the development of inter-agency partnerships that would lead Finland to be the safest
country in Europe by 2015 (Ministry of the Interior, 2004). Before two subsequent
updates for the programme (Ministry of the Interior, 2008; 2012), the initial programme
was followed by an additional national guidance for local safety planning in 2006. This
guidance required local authorities to compose a revised update of the safety plans that
corresponds to the aims of the Internal Security Programme, and finish the work by the
end of 2010 (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b).
Unfortunately, there is a very limited amount of valid research that evaluates the
Internal Security Programme, and a great deal of the obtainable literature is produced by
the Ministry of the Interior or researchers under its administration. However, researcher
Arno Tanner (2007) from the Finnish Police College has conducted a qualitative
evaluation that comprised of interviews of 27 professionals that have participated in the
initial programme development and implementation processes. The evaluation, which
forms only a summary of individual perceptions instead of analysis of efficacy, concluded
that a common opinion of government officials and third sector professionals was that the
first programme established a satisfactory basis for the internal security work (Tanner,
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28. 2007). Nonetheless, Tanner (2007) suggests that Finnish citizens had not yet benefited
from the programme on individual level. Additionally, the programme’s own evaluation
indicators – for example, rate for youth unemployment, number of organised crime
groups, or number of accidental deaths, among others – were not considered satisfactory
in order to be useful in measuring the programme’s success (Tanner, 2007).
Similarly, the updated local safety plans have not yet been subjected to an
extensive assessment that would provide valid research findings. Nevertheless, some
observations about the state of the revised planning process have been made by the
Ministry of the Interior (2011b). According to its review report, the majority of
municipalities were still in the process of finalising their plans after the proposed deadline
of 2010. However, the plans that were available demonstrated a strong focus on holistic
approach on safety and welfare in their objectives, which includes prevention of
accidents, crime and social exclusion, improvement of traffic safety, and reduction in
violence and misuse of drugs. According to the report (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b),
this reflects the emphasis of the Internal Security Programme and concerns and objectives
set by the central government. Consequently, in addition to evidencing a major shift from
sole crime prevention towards a wide-ranging concept of security within the Finnish
provision of community-based safety, this may be a sign of increasing governmental
steering. Nevertheless, as the report (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b) itself concludes,
existing research that would be adequate and generalisable is severely lacking.
3.4 The Diverging Visions of Community Policing and Safety
The experiences of policy implementations in Finland and Britain discussed in this
chapter reveal that the countries have fundamentally dissimilar visions of community
policing and safety. These visions can be illustrated through a typology of policies that
involves the contrasting social democratic welfarist type and a combination of neo-
liberalist and authoritarian communitarianist types (Darke, 2011). Furthermore, the
approaches between Britain and Finland are characterised by their different approaches to
community-based provision of security, namely community development and community
defence (Schneider, 2009). This division becomes apparent in the following findings.
Firstly, the research on Finnish local security management reveals that it is very
common for the local safety plans to make use of measures of social crime prevention
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29. (Virta, 2002b). Moreover, the key objectives and aims of local partnership working
stimulated by the National Crime Prevention Programme are very much concerned with
issues that are related to social welfare rather than crime itself (Virta, 2002b). According
to Savolainen (2005: 176), it seems that the social prevention approach drew all the
public funding provided by NCCP, allocated to local crime prevention initiatives, ‘... as of
2004 the matching-grant program had not funded a single intervention that could be
characterised as a clear-cut application of the situational approach’. As already
mentioned, the British interventions that were able to receive public funding were based
solely on situational prevention, and there has been a constant pressure to emphasise the
evidence-based ‘what works’ approach even after the abolished British Crime Prevention
Programme (Maguire, 2004; Hughes, 2007).
Furthermore, in addition to advocating social prevention projects whose outcomes
are difficult to observe in a short period of time (Savolainen, 2005), the Finnish local
security management has been moving towards a broader concept of security since the
implementation of the National Crime Prevention Programme. That is, according to Virta
(2013), security is understood holistically, including the feeling of insecurity and vast
comprehension of threats – not only criminal threats – that is consistent with the extensive
definition of security, originating from the context of international relations. However, in
Britain, the comprehension of security and its threats have been narrower although the
focus of governmental dialogue has gradually shifted from crime and disorder reduction
to community safety (Gilling et al., 2013). Whilst crime and disorder reduction was the
preferred rhetoric by the central government in the 1990s and early 2000s, local
authorities have promoted community safety in their manifestations from the early stages
of partnership working (Gilling and Schuller, 2007). Hence, Crime and Disorder
Reduction Partnerships have become Community Safety Partnerships that seek to take
people’s broad ranging worries about their safety into account (Gilling et al., 2013).
Therefore, in Britain, too, it is more widely perceived that these worries of safety do not
necessarily relate to crime at all but are a set of varying concerns that can have an effect
on the quality of life (Gilling and Schuller, 2007). Although the perception of community
safety extends from addressing crime risk to harms from varying sources, the
fundamental nature of community-based provision of security is still different than it is in
Finland.
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30. Simply put, it can be argued that security, as Virta (2002a) claims, is created
through community development in Finland, whereas in Britain security is supplied
through community defence. However, according to Schneider (2009), the approach of
community development in general has evolved since the mid-20th century, but it is
aiming at the prevention of crime through the improvement of community members’
quality of life; the reduction of inequality; the promotion of democratic values; the self-
development of individuals; and the pursuit of social cohesion (Schneider, 2009).
Furthermore, in Finland the approach is strongly related to a broader notion of the Nordic
welfare community (Lappi-Seppälä, 2012). According to Lappi-Seppälä (2012), since the
country’s independence in 1917 to the following decades of the Second World War, the
prevalent model of Finnish crime control was based on punishment. In the 1970s, Finland
became a part of the Nordic welfare community that emphasised state-sponsored welfare
provision, prosperity and equality (Lappi-Seppälä, 2012). Hence, the ‘Nordic Model’ of
security provision that emerged valued co-operative social democracy, non-punitiveness
and communitarian inclusion (Virta, 2013).
In the postwar Britain, the idea of a social democratic welfare state was
flourishing with a great optimism about national state-sponsored programmes that would
end deprivation and provide rehabilitation as well as cure crime and other social
sicknesses (Hughes and Edwards, 2005). However, during the last decades of the century,
the situation changed dramatically as the British Criminal Justice system fell into crisis
and the emerged neo-liberal individualism, and authoritarian conservatism created
pessimism towards the welfare programmes (Hughes and Edwards, 2005). Additionally,
the public recognised that the formal process of criminal justice – detection, prosecution
and punishment – did not have a wide-reaching effect on crime. Thus, crime became a
key element of political campaigns, and the focus shifted from the offender to the offence
(Crawford, 1998). Moreover, the modern focus on technical expertise and measures of
situational prevention with the significance of informal social control highlighted by
academics and practitioners became the strategy of the future (Crawford, 1998).
According to Crawford (1998), along with the ‘preventive turn’, the ideas of community
safety and partnerships became the means for delivering crime prevention to British
communities. The notion of community safety was inviting because it provided effective
exclusive control disguised in a tempting communitarian idea of inclusive security
(Edwards and Hughes, 2009). Furthermore, the idea of partnerships was considered useful
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31. in achieving a greater governmental efficiency with better local outcomes that would be
delivered through co-operation of local agencies and community (Hope, 2009).
Consequently, at the time when Finland joined the Nordic welfare community,
Britain abandoned the state-sponsored welfare provision but advocated such a governance
of crime that promoted exclusive situational measures, and in which people had more
responsibility of their own security (Hughes and Edwards, 2005; Crawford, 2009). This is
embodied in the approach of community defence, which is built on the utilisation of local
informal social control exercised by vigilant community residents (Schneider, 2009).
Schneider (2009) argues that community defence seeks to reduce crime by training
community members to act and behave in a manner that limits their opportunity to
become a victim of crime. Moreover, the approach attempts to improve the informal
social control through design of physical environment and personal and collective
measures (Schneider, 2009). According to Graham and Bennett (1995, as cited in Virta,
2002a), community defence occurs in settings where high crime and mistrust towards the
police motivate citizens to protect their community. Protection can take place, for
example, through creating ‘defensible space’ which, according to Newman (1972), is a
combination of mechanisms that enable the control of community territory. The control of
the territory can be formed, at its simplest, with barriers that also increase the feeling of
security in the process of restricting access to the territory. The access restriction is
enhanced with the element of natural surveillance that the community members conduct
along with their daily lives (Newman, 1972).
The prevalence of community defence in Britain and its absence in Finland can be
demonstrated with the following observations. Firstly, in addition to the needs for
improved community-police relations since the 1970s discussed earlier (Tilley, 2008a),
the fear of crime in Britain is relatively high when compared to Finland (van Dijk,
Manchin, van Kesteren, Nevala and Hideg, 2007). According to national survey
comparisons by van Dijk et al. (2007), people were twice as afraid of their house being
burgled in the UK in the coming year than they were in Finland, for instance. Secondly,
according to a pan-European comparison study in 2006, over one third of the UK
households were reported to have burglar alarms (Crawford, 2009). As the comparable
figure in Finland was less than one out of ten households, it is evident that situational
protection methods are rooted in the British culture (Crawford, 2009). Thirdly, since the
early 1980s the Neighbourhood Watch schemes that are constructed around community
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32. defence and the theory of defensible space, have been popular in Britain. The schemes are
interventions of organised community-based activity in which people vigilantly provide
surveillance in their neighbourhoods and improve the protection of their homes with the
guidance of the police (Bennett, 2008). On the contrary, these types of interventions
cannot be found in Finland. In fact, there is a politically set informal agreement that
Finland should stay free of all kinds of neighbourhood interventions that involve
volunteers patrolling the streets of the community (Lemmetyinen, Järg-Tärno and
Pekkarinen, 2013). However, this claim was made in a report (Lemmetyinen et al., 2013)
on the development of official Finnish neighbouring help system by a multi-agency
working group founded under the Internal Security Programme (Ministry of the Interior,
2012) and thus, has to be considered with caution; yet, it still describes the Finnish stance
on community defence. On the other hand, Britain has traditionally had favourable
settings for community defence and, thus, British communities have favoured this
approach over community development.
To sum up, it can be argued that community policing and safety are based on the
neo-liberal and authoritarian communitarianist visions in Britain, whereas in Finland they
are strongly based on the vision of social democratic welfare within the typology of
Western community safety policies (Darke, 2011). The social democratic, welfarist
Finland values communal activity and inclusive techniques, and embraces social crime
prevention (Crawford, 2009; Darke, 2011). This insight is contested by the British neo-
liberal vision that promotes exclusive measures, privatism, and situational prevention
methods in which ‘... social exclusion has shifted from the prison to the spatial and
temporal aspects of everyday life’ (Darke, 2011: 412). Moreover, neo-liberalism is
supported by the authoritarian communitarianism that considers civil legislation as a set
of measures available for crime controlling purposes (Darke, 2011). Hence, Darke (2011)
claims that the communitarian social regulation that, for example, is materialised in the
form of enforcing civil orders – such as Anti Social Behaviour Orders introduced by the
Crime and Disorder Act 1998 used in controlling certain activity and access to places and
can be issued to people who cause disorder and distress to other people – has long ago
replaced social protection by the welfarist state in the neo-liberal Britain (Darke, 2011).
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33. 4. CHAPTER II: Experiences of Rural Implementations
4.1 The Idyll of Countryside Community
Before examining how the different visions of community policing and safety in
Finland and Britain are utilised in rural areas and what the resulting experiences imply in
the rural context, this chapter outlines the settings of Finnish and British countryside. A
common notion in the discussion comparing urban and rural security in Western countries
is that life in the cities is constantly restrained by the threat of crime, whereas the
countryside is a crime-free idyl where children can play outside alone and doors can be
left unlocked. Additionally, it is commonly claimed that if rural crime did occur in today’s
world, its experience in the countryside would not differ significantly from the
experiences in the cities apart from its infrequency. Dingwall and Moody (1999) claim
that these naive comprehensions have been sustained by the past criminological research
based on inadequate analysis of rurality and the complicated circumstances of geographic,
demographic and human structures within it. Furthermore, according to Garland and
Chakraborti (2007), the people living in the British countryside have commonly perceived
their living environment as affectionate, easy and stereotypically English. However,
during the recent decades sociological and criminological research has revealed that this
perception conceals different forms of marginalization in, and exclusion from, the rural
community (Garland and Chakraborti, 2007). This includes, for example,
overrepresentation of the prosperous middle classes over the less affluent classes in the
countryside imagery; the expected role of females in the upkeep of the male-headed
household; and the experienced racism and harassment of minority ethnic populations.
Moreover, these findings combined with reported transport problems, diminishing rural
public services, and high-profile events such as the outbreak of foot and mouth disease or
avian influenza in the 2000s have eroded the idyll of the countryside (Garland and
Chakraborti, 2007). Furthermore, in the end of the 1990s it was accepted that statistics of
recorded crime on their own do not alone provide a sufficient picture of rural crime, but
qualitative knowledge of crime, fear of crime, and the relationship with the police in the
countryside communities are important as well (Koffman, 1999). Consequently, the
context of social life, its perceptions and the everyday living in the countryside
communities construct a framework for the analysis of the experiences of community
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34. policing and community safety in Finland and Britain, which is examined in the following
discussion.
To start with, the concept of community needs to be discussed. Sociological theory
suggests that community can be seen as an entity that holds something in common
between individuals, namely ‘place’, ‘interest’ or ‘attachment’ (Willmott, 1986 as cited in
Crow and Maclean, 2006). Thus, a group of people can be connected through, for
example, a shared living environment as a place, same employer or a common hobby as
interest, and religion or other connecting belief as attachment (Crow and Maclean, 2006).
However, according to Crow and Maclean (2006) it is usual that a particular community
is defined through not only one but a combination of these three aspects. Furthermore,
individuals who do not have anything in common with the group of people in the
particular community in terms of these aspects are excluded from the community and
labelled outsiders or ‘others’. They are also considered to pose a threat, as they are
associated with rivalling aspects of place, interest or attachment (Crow and Maclean,
2006). Furthermore, community is constructed by means of the pioneering work by
Tönnies (1955), whose comprehension of a sociological system involves the concepts of
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft which incorporate the notions of natural will and rational
will. Gemeinschaft, which translates into community, is predominated by the natural will
– the indigenous human volition guided indirectly by people’s conscience and knowledge
shaped and learnt through the history of human life (Tönnies, 1955). Tönnies (1955)
argues that its nature is the most original one, whereas the rational will – founded
predominant within Gesellschaft which translates into association or society – is
fundamentally affected and steered by conscious thinking that eliminates natural
subconscious factors (Tönnies, 1955). However, '[t]he essence of both Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft is found interwoven in all kinds of associations ...' (Tönnies, 1955: 18).
Despite that, Tönnies (1955) identified rural villages as communities where the
natural will bonds people together not only through blood relations but also affection and
neighbourliness, and in which people have been traditionally united by their living
environment and agrarian economy. Although rural village might have an aspect of
interest or attachment community, it is the very rurality that makes it primarily a place
community. For place communities, according to Crow and Maclean (2006), the process
of ‘othering’ is a way to reinforce the sense of solidarity. The sense of solidarity and
emphasis on ‘our community’ is a way to express the sense of belonging, which attaches
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35. individuals into a particular community such as a rural village. That is, the familiar
geographical location and the social network of family and friends that offers social
support, tie individuals to their communities (Crow and Maclean, 2006). Therefore, a
community embodied with natural will offers people a safe haven offering security.
Nevertheless, since the emergence of the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,
sociologists (Tönnies, 1955; Crow and Maclean, 2006) have argued that the Industrial
Revolution, capitalism, individualism and modernity in general have impaired the natural
will of community and replaced it with the rational will of society. Moreover, Tönnies
(1955: 28) claims that social life itself has not disappeared but is increasingly controlled
by ‘... the needs, interests, desires and decisions ...’ shaped by the rational will which has
become predominant over natural will.
In spite of this change, according to Crow and Maclean (2006), the idea of
community is still alive in the 21st century. Furthermore, the ability of community to
provide anchoring points for individuals in the unpredictable world is significant, but it is
true that the global economy is treating rural village communities especially harshly. For
example, since the traditional countryside occupations have nowadays not only local but
also global competitors, the countryside offers less different possibilities to earn one’s
living than the cities. Hence, people living in rural communities have less power over
their own life decisions than they used to have (Crow and Maclean, 2006). Consequently,
today the idyll of rural community is something else than it was before.
The next section examines the context of social life in rural Finland and Britain
more thoroughly. Although the settings involve structures and processes that have
different political, cultural and societal aspects, they are not divided into categories but
treated as a whole. As Halfacree (2006a as cited in Yarwood and Mawby, 2010) suggests,
a holistic comprehension of the matrix of affecting political forces, cultural practices and
societal norms is achieved when rural settings are looked through a model of three layers.
The interconnected layers allow an examination of rural crime and insecurity by
combining, firstly, the varying proportions of physical rural space and its societal
dimensions; secondly, the imaginations and visions of the idyll and the reality of rurality;
and thirdly, the feelings, perceptions and actions of countryside dwellers (Yarwood and
Mawby, 2010).
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36. 4.2 Context of Social Life in Rural Britain and Finland
Although the terms ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ are mutually exclusive and appear easy to
understand, the accurate definition that separates rural from urban is not uncomplicated.
Nevertheless, different governments and institutions can have such definitions most
suitable for their own use, and areas can be categorised, for example, according to
population density or size of settlements (Anderson, 1999). For example, according to
Statistics Finland (2013), municipalities that have less than 60 per cent of the population
living in urban settlements and the largest settlement has less than 15,000 inhabitants, or
municipalities that have between 60 and 90 per cent of the population living in urban
settlements and the largest settlement has less than 4000 inhabitants, are officially
considered as rural. On the contrary, in Britain, according to a primary definition – which
is replaced with a secondary six point scaled local authority classification in the cases
where local data is inadequate – by Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
(DEFRA, 2013), areas are considered being rural if they have less than 10,000 residents.
However, for the purposes of this dissertation such a definition is not required, as all
possible settings defined rural in the source literature have been included in the
examination. This is because the purpose here is not to compare specific crime prevention
or policing programmes but to provide an overall understanding of community policing
and safety in areas that are not considered urban in Britain and Finland.
Britain and Finland are very different in geographical and demographical terms.
For example, in Finland in 2009, the population density of the 303,000 km2 land area was
17.1 people per square kilometre on average, but the highest areal density was 216 people
per square kilometre in the Uusimaa region in Southern Finland, and the lowest only two
people per square kilometre in Lapland in the north (Ministry of the Interior, 2009a). In
comparison, according to the 2011 census data the overall population density on the
151,000 km2 area of England and Wales was 372 people per square kilometre, but the
highest density on the local authority level was measured in few thousands and the lowest
in several tens of people per square kilometre (Office for National Statistics, 2013b).
Furthermore, in 2009, out of the 348 Finnish municipalities with a local government, 219
were officially classified as rural. Many of these rural municipalities had vast areas of
wilderness that were not populated at all (Ministry of the Interior, 2009a). Although
comparable information on district level was not available from England and Wales, it can
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37. be suggested that what is generally considered rural in geographical terms in England and
Wales might not exactly correspond with the Finnish comprehension of rurality in every
given case. In other words, unlike in Britain, rurality in Finland is often characterised by
extremely long distances between settlements (Oinas, 2012).
In relation to population structure, Finland and England are quite similar as rural
communities are predominantly inhabited by older people in both countries (Ministry of
the Interior, 2009a; DEFRA, 2013). Nevertheless, it is important to note that internal
migration between urban and rural areas goes in opposite directions in these countries. In
the end of the 2000s, people were increasingly migrating to the countryside in England,
whereas in Finland the countryside communities were suffering from decreasing
population figures (Ministry of the Interior, 2009a; DEFRA, 2013). Consequently, in both
cases, these developments have an impact on the feelings of people living in the
countryside but what the feelings are like is dependent on the other aspects of social life.
For example, the diminishing public services caused by cutbacks in public administration
can cause worry of adequate public policing as much in growing rural communities as in
shrinking ones (Ministry of the Interior, 2009a).
The study of Piippo et al. (2006), mentioned in the previous chapter, introduces
the municipality of Viitasaari which is a good example of a rural community in Finland.
Viitasaari is located in central Finland and, in 2004 it had a population of 7602 inhabitants
scattered across the 1,589 square kilometre area with a density of 6.1 people per square
kilometre. However, Piippo et al. (2006) recognise that the population of the municipality
is ageing and diminishing, as over 60 per cent of citizens were over 40 years old in 2004,
and the population was expected to decrease by 15 per cent between 2004 and 2020. In
comparison, the national average rate for people over 40 years old in Finnish
municipalities is closer to 50 per cent (Piippo et al., 2006). The economic structure of
Viitasaari is a typical one for a rural municipality, as a relatively high proportion of
people work in the field of agriculture and forestry. The dominating field of employment
is service industry, but its proportion in Viitasaari is lower than in the urban Finland
(Piippo et al., 2006). Consequently, the premise of Piippo et al. (2006) was that issues
related to crime and the fear for it among the residents of Viitasaari differ from urban
areas but the findings were twofold.
Piippo et al. (2006) found that the greatest concern among the research
respondents in Viitasaari – representing the participating organisations in local safety
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38. planning partnership, as described in the previous chapter – was the use of intoxicants,
which corresponded to the concerns of their counterparts in other locations representing
urban areas. Moreover, at the time of research the consumption of alcohol was increasing
in Viitasaari, but so it was in the whole of Finland (Piippo et al., 2006). Thus, it could be
argued that as the excessive use of alcohol is perceived to be such a significant factor
causing insecurity in the Finnish culture and society in general, the other cultural or
societal aspects in rural Viitasaari may not have a significant effect on this particular
concern. However, the low spend of public money – only 3.1 euros per citizen in
Viitasaari in relation to the national average of 18.7 euros per citizen – in social and
educational work related to alcohol and other intoxicants could have some impact (Piippo
et al., 2006). Furthermore, the study showed that violent crimes and crimes involving
domestic violence had been strongly increasing between 2000 and 2004 in this rural area
and had risen in similar fashion, or more, in the studied urban areas. This was perceived
to be strongly related to the use of alcohol by the study respondents (Piippo et al., 2006).
Therefore, it could be further claimed that the excessive use of alcohol and subsequent
high level of violent crime could be major causes of insecurity in rural Viitasaari, which
do not differ much from the concerns in the urban Finland.
Despite these relatively corresponding concerns and rates of violence in the
studied urban municipalities and rural Viitasaari, the measured sense of insecurity among
residents differed between these areas (Piippo et al., 2006). In 2003, the sense of
insecurity was evaluated with a regional survey asking the citizens how secure or insecure
they felt when walking alone on the streets at night in the weekend. The structured survey
constituted of a random sample of 108,000 people aged between 15 and 74, of which 46
per cent responded via letters and online (Turvallisuustutkimus, 2003 as cited in Piippo et
al., 2006). Where 25 to 30 per cent of citizens in the urban areas felt safe, in Viitasaari 45
per cent of people were not afraid in the described situation (Piippo et al., 2006). Thus,
the countryside environment, greater distances and fewer people outside during weekend
nights could have an effect on the sense of insecurity and fear of crime. Similarly, some
other political, cultural or societal factors could have an effect on the matter.
Although incomparable to the example of rural Viitasaari, a brief look of rural
communities in England reveals some implications of the reality of life in the British
countryside. According to Stenson and Watt (1999), the increasing population in the
British countryside is confronting deep inequalities in wealth and power. Already in the
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