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From Great Britain to SwedenThe Import of Reassurance Policing. Local Police Offices in Metropolitan Stockholm

NCJ Number
231016
Journal
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention Volume: 11 Issue: 1 Dated: 2010 Pages: 25-45
Author(s)
Abby Peterson
Date Published
2010
Length
21 pages
Annotation
The focus for this paper is to acquire an understanding as to how police policy and policing practices transfer to new contexts and the changes that inevitably occur while doing so.
Abstract
Martin Innes (2006) has called attention to a recent revitalization of community policing in the Anglo-American policing sphere, albeit in new forms and variations. The discursive and concomitant policy shift in Britain away from 'community policing' towards notions of 'reassurance' and 'neighbourhood' policing has not gone unnoticed in Sweden. Good ideas appear to travel readily eastwards from their British contexts to find translations in the Swedish context. Subsequently, in 2006 the regional police commander in the Stockholm metropolitan area initiated a new community policing programme with the establishment of 10-15 so-called local police offices in targeted depressed areas of the region, and by the end of 2009 there will be a total of 27. The overall goal of the programme is to create a sense of security among residents in these areas and to build upon and sustain the residents' trust and confidence in the police, while at the same time working towards achieving a reduction in crime and maintaining respect for law and order. In this paper the author interrogates the translation processes whereby the notions of 'reassurance' and 'neighbourhood' policing have been partially adopted, adapted, and implemented in a Swedish policing contextcollective translation processes that have been wrought with points of friction, i.e. both creative and unproductive resistance. References (Published Abstract)