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

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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...............................................................................................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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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(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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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late 1990s, it was increasingly acknowledged that the ownership of land was still unequal,

as large areas of countryside were controlled by a relatively small group of people and

families (Stenson and Watt, 1999). Hence, this reflected in the unequal access to housing,

in which middle and upper classes had an advantage that could spark rural conflicts.

Furthermore, the conflicts were fuelled by the fear of dangers posed by ‘others’. This

effect got multiplied with the impact of media that reinforced the distress about increasing

crime, pollution, road traffic and other harms brought by people moving from the cities to

the countryside (Stenson and Watt, 1999). Moreover, Stenson and Watt (1999) claim that

the neo-liberal development across the British society and pessimism towards the ability

of the state to provide sufficient security made people, not only in urban but also in rural

areas, take more responsibility of their safety, which increases the rural inequality.

Consequently, the inequality has led to polarisations of rural living such as villages that

constitute of contrasting areas of social classes (Stenson and Watt, 1999). For example an

unnamed village in Buckinghamshire developed an affluent and idyllic side which

inhabited middle classes living in smart detached houses and cottages, and another side

consisting of council estates formed of blockhouses and isolated from the centre village,

which were largely inhabited by impoverished urban incomers. In this village, conflicts

were not uncommon between the affluent villagers living an active community-life and

the estate inhabitants, who suffered from the lack of community facilities, and were often

treated as outsiders in the village causing distress and fear among the affluent villagers

(Stenson and Watt, 1999).

These examples of very different contexts of social life in the rural Finland and

Britain are not comprehensive but provide an image of the complex political, cultural and

other societal structures and processes, in which the problems related to crime and

insecurity arise (Hughes, 2007). The same structures and processes also construct the

framework for the Finnish and British community policing and safety policies as well as

strategies that are seeking to address these problems. However, for the purposes of this

dissertation, it is not necessary to arrange all the various problems and government

responses into any particular order. The following sections will examine two examples of

these.

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4.3 The Representations of Rural Crime and Insecurity

The two major problems prevalent in the countryside communities across Britain

and Finland relate to the difference of the true levels of crime and people’s perception of

crime as well as to the public provision of safety and security services that are down-

scaled and centralised leading to a patchy rural service network. In the following, these

issues are assessed considering certain representations of the countryside that the research

on the problem of crime in rural areas has revealed. The representations construct a

multifaceted entity of perceptions that are interwoven with each others (Gilling, 2010).

This entity also involves the following examples from Finland and Britain.

As already discussed, countryside is repeatedly described as an idyllic and crime-

free heaven, where the impression of tranquility denies the existence of badness and

crime. Additionally, the police has also adopted this conception, which offers a valid

reason for providing limited resources in some rural communities and concentrate them

on urban problem areas (Gilling, 2010). Academics (Dingwall and Moody, 1999;

Dingwall, 2010) suggest that the high criminological and political focus on the urban

crime problem in Britain and the assumed displacement of crime partially to the British

countryside have obtained high national media coverage which is also transmitted to rural

areas. Hence, the naturally strong perception of countryside residents that their idyll is

threatened by the ‘others’ is reinforced by the impact of mass media. According to

Anderson (1999), a common belief is that disorder, vandalism, drug-use and anti-social

behaviour is increasingly caused by outsiders to the rural community, namely travelling

criminals from the urban communities. Consequently, this belief that does not seem to

have any valid evidence for its truthfulness has transformed the representation of the idyll

into a representation of the endangered countryside, reflecting the worries of especially

British villagers (Gilling, 2010).

Another portrayal of the rural inhabitants being afraid has been upheld particularly

by the police, who consider the problem of rural crime as a problem of rural fear of crime

instead of a problem of victimisation (Gilling, 2010). This might be an accurate view as,

according to a recent analysis of victimisation by the Crime Survey for England and

Wales published in 2013, 20.1 per cent of respondents living in urban areas said they had

been victims of crime at some point over the past 12 months, whereas 13.4 per cent of

rural residents participating in the survey asserted the same (Office for National Statistics,

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2013a). Therefore, it seems that, in general, crime takes place relatively more seldom in

the rural Britain than it does in the urban areas. Still, during the past few decades the fear

of crime appears to have been increasing. That is, research by Countryside Agency (2004

as cited in Gilling, 2010) has suggested that the fear of crime has been rising more in the

countryside than it has in the British cities, although rural fear has not been as high as

urban fear. The research argues that the increased rate of headline rural crimes could have

been a major reason for the growing fear. For example, according to Aust and Simmons

(2002 as cited in Gilling, 2010), it was widely acknowledged among rural villagers that

burglaries had tripled from the early 1980s to 2001 in the countryside, whereas in the

cities household crimes had decreased during the 1990s. Thus, a great jump in one type of

crime had a major impact on people’s concerns about crime in general (Gilling, 2010).

However, it has been argued that the growing fear has been affected by a combination of a

sense of isolation, local gossip, and a lack of supporting services for those who have been

victimised (Anderson, 1999; Gilling, 2010). Additionally, the level of fear is also

impacted by individual factors such as age and sex (Ministry of the Interior, 2009b).

If the fear of rural crime is a problem in the rural Britain, the problems related to

people’s perceptions are different in the Finnish countryside. That is, according to a

research comparing the Police Barometers (Ministry of the Interior, 2009b), which are

surveys probing citizens’ perceptions about policing conducted in every two or three

years since 1999, the majority of Finnish people living in rural areas did not consider

crime to be a major problem That is, only 13 per cent saw it as a problem in 2009. In

addition, the fear of becoming a victim of crime had reduced little between 2006 and

2009 (Ministry of the Interior, 2009b). The feeling of general insecurity, on the other

hand, had increased during the last half of the 2000s and, for example, in 2009 30 per cent

of the Police Barometer respondents in rural Finland considered the security of public

places to be worse than it was considered three years before (Ministry of the Interior,

2009b). In fact, the fear of being involved in a car crash caused the greatest concern

(Ministry of the Interior, 2009b). Furthermore, the worries related to respondents family

and their living environment had grown in the last comparison period. The worries

include having a serious illness, unemployment and problems related to economy as well

as the availability of public services such as health, safety and security services (Ministry

of the Interior, 2009b). However, the difference between urban and rural areas was very

low in relation to all other aspects, but rural residents found the availability of safety and

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security services more worrying. They were also more worried about the abilities of the

police to be successful in their work (Ministry of the Interior, 2009b).

Evidently, the sense of general insecurity is a major problem in the Finnish

countryside. According to Oinas (2012), the rural insecurity is an outcome of combined

impacts by various interlinked factors that grow from the long distances between cities,

towns and villages. The long distances are highlighted by often insufficient means of

public transport and traffic issues caused by occasional poor weather conditions. As

majority of rural residents are older people, their worry about own health or the condition

of friends and family becomes pronounced (Oinas, 2012). Furthermore, the long response

times of emergency and policing services further exacerbates these concerns. Finally, the

sense of insecurity is strengthened due to greater possibility of fewer social contacts as

many have left the countryside (Oinas, 2012). However, the internal migration from the

countryside, the decreasing public as well as private services and the growing insecurity

go hand in hand. This has also been considered in a governmental report by the Ministry

of the Interior (2009a), which states that the availability of safety, security and other

services in the sparsely populated areas is crucial in preserving the feeling of security and

bringing the migration into the cities to a halt. Additionally, the findings in the Police

Barometer comparison study (Ministry of the Interior, 2009b) suggest that Finnish rural

residents highlight short distance to public policing services and occasional visible

presence of police officers as significant factors in their feeling of security. Therefore, it

can be suggested that the lacking local police, fire and emergency, and health services are

causing a major problem in rural Finland.

Closing down of local police stations has also raised concerns in rural Britain.

Mawby (2004) studied residents’ perception in rural Cornwall with a postal survey in

2003 that constituted of a random sample of 3,752 respondents with a 36.5 per cent

response rate. The results showed that three out of four respondents were unhappy with

the number of police officers in their living area, and over half had the impression that

this number had reduced during the past year. Furthermore, respondents saw the reduction

in the number of local police stations and the lack of a 24-hour police service point as a

disadvantage because this had weakened the access to the police (Mawby, 2004).

Additionally, instead of a service phone system that connects the citizens’ calls to the

centralised police headquarters, the respondents would have wanted contact numbers for

local police stations. However, the poor accessibility that reflected as an unsatisfactory

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relationship with the police was highlighted among those respondents, who ‘... were least

satisfied with where they lived, those who lived some distance from a police station, those

who had recently been victimised, and those who were most concerned about crime,

disorder and safety issues ...’ (Mawby, 2004: 444). Consequently, the needs for improved

interaction with the police do not distribute evenly but are clearly concentrated according

to factors related to prevalent circumstances.

The widening gap in public service provision does not concern only the victims of

crime but also the perpetrators of crime. Gilling (2010) claims that as the public service

provision is growingly more patchy and limited, it is increasingly difficult to prevent

crime, for instance, by rehabilitating offenders. Similarly, poor services for youth can

increase their frustration with the life in the countryside, lead to delinquency and hence

have a further impact on their life prospects (Gilling, 2010). According to Gilling (2010),

this portrays the representation of the deprived countryside that can be seen emerging in

the public discussion of cutbacks and down-scaling of services in rural areas and

concentrating them in urban areas. Moreover, surveys such as the Aberystwyth Crime

Survey in Wales 1993 and the Finnish Police Barometer 2012 (Koffman, 1999; Ministry

of the Interior, 2013), have found that people living in the countryside report crimes to the

police more seldom than residents in the cities. This is due to people’s perception in

Britain that crimes that went unreported were too minor to report, or that the busy police

would not be interested in their cases that were not especially serious which was the case

in Finland (Koffman, 1999; Ministry of the Interior, 2013). Therefore, as the situation in

Finland today is similar than it was two decades ago in Wales, it can be argued that the

limited police service in the countryside lowers the public’s will to resort to it in some

cases. More importantly, the continuously diminishing rural public services can have a

further negative effect on people’s confidence in them and may lead to further outcomes

that increase the significance of community defence (Schneider, 2009).

The representations of the idyllic countryside and its transformation into the

endangered countryside and the police officials’ perception of the frightened countryside,

as well as the deprived countryside that is reflected in public concerns of weakening

provision of rural policing, excellently describe the problems that national policies and

strategies of community policing and safety seek to address. Hence, in rural Britain the

main challenge seems to be the unbalanced relation of fear of crime and actual crime,

whereas in Finland the diminishing public safety, security and other services appears to be

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the major cause of general insecurity among those who have decided to stay in the

countryside.

4.4 Community Policing and Safety in the Countryside

This final section will examine some implications of the implemented policies and

strategies of community policing and community safety in the Finnish and British

countryside that are seeking to address the problems discussed in the previous section.

Firstly, it focuses on the efforts of transferring urban-based strategies of community

policing and safety to rural Britain, and, secondly, it concentrates on the plans for

implementing the model of local security management in rural Finland. Nevertheless, as

already discussed, the establishment of CDRPs in the end of the 1990s altered the field of

governance of crime in Britain. As a result, according to Gilling (2010), rural crime

control has become more populated as its responsibilities are shared between different

agencies participating in the partnerships. Simultaneously, and partly as a result, rural

policing has changed (Gilling, 2010).

In the mid-20th century Britain, rural village police was an officer who was

isolated from other officers, lived and worked in a constabulary-owned house, and was

dependent on the community members (Cain, 1973 as cited in Mawby, 2010). However,

today British constables are involved with both urban and rural surroundings and patrol

much larger areas than before. Additionally, the officers that are no longer scattered

across districts but based on centralised police stations use motorised transport and more

developed communications technology and, thus, are no longer dependent on local people

(Mawby, 2010). Nevertheless, it is not only the increased use of technologies or today’s

performance-oriented management style but also the boundaries of policing have become

aligned with local authority boundaries, and the police is in continuous co-operation with

other public and non-public agencies involved in community safety partnerships (Gilling,

2010). Therefore, the difference between urban and rural policing is not that significant

anymore, which has promoted the implementation of similar strategies in both settings.

In addition to community safety partnerships, Neighbourhood Policing is an

example of a new strategy that has spread across urban and rural settings. The

Neighbourhood Policing Teams that are constituted of police officers and PCSOs can be

found both from the City of Westminster in London and Upper Valley in West Yorkshire,

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for instance (Metropolitan Police, 2013; West Yorkshire Police, 2013). Hence, the

reassurance of local residents and meeting their concerns is done using fundamentally

similar methods in both the inner cities and the countryside villages (Gilling, 2010).

Furthermore, a significant responsibility in achieving this outcome is left to the PCSOs,

whose role was initially established for the purposes of urban communities (Merritt and

Dingwall, 2010).

In order to find out what the work of PCSOs is like in the countryside, Merritt and

Dingwall (2010) conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 19 PCSOs

and 20 police officers from three English police forces, from which one served almost

entirely rural population and the two others covered a combination of rural and urban

areas. Merritt and Dingwall (2010) found that according to police officers and PCSOs

itself, they were able to provide some reassurance of crime and disorder control in those

communities that were difficult for the police to reach. Moreover, the welcome by rural

residents had been positive, and some villagers had claimed that PCSOs had revived the

positive aspects that use to be related to ‘village bobbies’, namely, a good knowledge

about local issues and mutual respect with the people. This finding is consistent with

Mawby’s (2004) observation hat people living in rural England still long for law

enforcement officials that would be part of their community. However, Merritt and

Dingwall (2010) draw attention to the stance of police professionals who argue that the

long-gone village officers are impossible to bring back and the limited role of PCSOs

does not carry over to continuously diversifying rural Britain.

Merritt and Dingwall (2010) suggest that the rural PCSOs have faced some

problems, too. For example, they were unable to respond all the concerns of local

residents, mainly due to their limited powers. Additionally, the effective working in large

rural patrolling areas would have required motorised transport that all PCSOs did not

have, and using transport would have contradicted with the initial insight that PCSOs are

meant to patrol on foot (Merritt and Dingwall, 2010). According to Merritt and Dingwall

(2010), the study respondents were also concerned about endangering the already

achieved good relationship with community members in a situation where PCSOs would

have to employ their provisional detention and arrest powers. Therefore, it is likely that

the role of PCSOs as such is not adequate, efficient and useful enough for the

requirements and settings of countryside areas, and more research on this topic is needed

(Merritt and Dingwall, 2010).

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If Neighbourhood Policing has come across problems in rural Britain, so has the

community safety partnership approach by the central government. Yarwood (2010)

argues that the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was not successful in steering the lowest

level local authorities in small towns and rural villages to participate in crime prevention.

It seems that the issue here has been in the structures of partnerships in rural areas that

have not included parish councils in the partnership working as often as they should have,

as the parish councils could empower local residents to take part in local activities

(Yarwood, 2010). According to Yarwood (2010), only one fifth of the English and Welsh

parish councils were participating in the work of the district level CDRPs, as discussed in

the previous section. Moreover, only five per cent of the parish councils that were

participating in the partnership claimed that they had not been delegated any

responsibility by the partnership (Yarwood, 2010). Furthermore, Yarwood (2010) argues

that the lack of council participation has been due to the councils’ opinion that the

planning of local policing is the sole responsibility of the police. Alternatively, the low

levels of crime have not motivated the councils, or they have not been aware that they

should participate, which may be due to the fact that the requirements of the Crime and

Disorder Act 1998 did not reach the parish councils (Yarwood, 2010).

Another government steered measure to improve community safety in rural

Britain that run into problems was the Rural Policing Fund, which operated between 2001

and 2006 (Yarwood, 2010). The Fund had an objective to improve the visibility and

accessibility of the police in the countryside through community-based initiatives across

England such as establishing mobile police stations, employing police officers specialised

in rural communities, and setting up community liaison groups and bicycle police patrols.

However, many of these initiatives failed due to the low levels of crime, the need of the

police in urban areas, and the subsequent low general interest towards these initiatives,

which may have had impact on the closing down of the Fund (Yarwood, 2010).

Consequently, the examples of low participation of parish councils in partnerships and the

relatively short life of the Rural Policing Fund demonstrates that prevention of crime in

rural settings has not attracted the interest of any of the actors in the countryside, namely,

the democratic entity representing the public, the central and local governments, and the

police, who have all tried to pass the responsibility of taking care of the lively community

safety to each others (Yarwood, 2010).

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It can be argued that the British community policing and safety strategies designed

for urban challenges have demonstrated everything else but great success in rural areas.

While the setting up of partnerships, employment of PCSOs, and various other efforts in

the British countryside have not been convincing, the Finnish model of local security

management may be providing better results, although valid evidence of such outcomes is

still missing. That is, the prevalent Finnish Internal Security Programme (Ministry of the

Interior, 2012) introduced in the previous chapter has taken a broad approach that has

been recognised as useful in addressing the rural problem of insecurity caused mainly by

lacking local public services. The approach is constituted of several parts, but two of them

are especially significant. The first part is the scaling of the process of local safety

planning to span different levels of society, namely regional, municipal and local village

levels, and the second is the regeneration and support of the sense of community. It could

be suggested that these two parts are a cause and a result, as the extension of safety

planning to cover both municipal and village level will create local activity in villages

that enhances the sense of community which has a further effect on the feeling of

insecurity (Oinas, 2012). Nevertheless, for the purposes of this dissertation the parts are

addressed separately in order to provide an analysis of their independent nature.

Firstly, the two times updated Internal Security Programme focuses more on the

challenges of sparsely populated countryside than the prior Finnish government policies

(Oinas, 2007). According to Oinas (2012), the programme acknowledges the importance

of the availability of public safety, security and health services but also the adequate and

modern-day communication services. Additionally, it emphasises the special needs of

elderly people regarding all these services as well as states that the regional and local

authorities are responsible for their provision (Oinas, 2012). Furthermore, the programme

guides local authorities to arrange the process of local security management to compass

the levels of regional and municipal administration, sub-city areas of larger cities, and

village communities in the Finnish countryside (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b). This is

evidently a response to the concerns that arose during the initial composition of the local

safety plans in the beginning of the 2000s, which stated that the safety plans were not

taking rural areas into consideration. For example, Virta (2002b) did not find evidence

that the safety plans paid attention to crime and insecurity in sparsely populated areas.

Consequently, the updated central government instructions that were delivered in 2006

suggested that the purpose of regional plans would be to integrate municipal plans and

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cover multi-area interventions. Additionally, the village plans would implement the

municipal level plans in the context of countryside villages as well as take the specified

concerns of rural residents into account (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b).

Secondly, according to Oinas (2012), the voluntarily organised community activity

and local associations can fight against the growing insecurity caused by the diminishing

security services by regenerating the sense of community. Thus, rural insecurity can be

treated through community building, which is considered to involve ‘... intentional efforts

to organize and strengthen social connections or build common values that promote

collective goals (or both)’ (Briggs, 2003: 246 as cited in Schneider, 2009: 166). Although

community building is a key measure in the social crime prevention, it is also a helpful

tool in addressing the feeling of insecurity through its positive impact on the sense of

community (Schneider, 2009). Moreover, community building is characteristic of the

community development style of community-based security provision that is prevalent in

Finland (Virta, 2002a; Schneider, 2009). However, Oinas (2012) reminds that the upkeep

of the sense of community needs to be closely involved in the processes of local security

management on the countryside village level because relying solely on the regeneration of

the sense of community is not a sustainable measure in the long run. In other words, the

village level safety plans need to be constructive in providing a holistic approach to the

the diminishing services, the feeling of insecurity, and the regeneration of the sense of

community (Oinas, 2012).

Despite the recognised needs for the sense of community, the regeneration efforts

may still encounter difficulties. Oinas (2012) claims that according to her research, the

majority of respondents that constituted of Finnish people living in rural villages value

the help of friends, relatives and neighbours in the various tasks of everyday life above

the assistance of public services or voluntary organisations. Additionally, the individuals

who work for service providers within these villages and are interested in the residents’

wellbeing are seen significant in their ability to provide sense of security for the villagers

(Oinas, 2012). Thus, it seems that communal care-taking by community members and

other people who are present in the community is a key factor in producing the feeling of

security. Furthermore, Oinas (2012) claims that the residents of the countryside

considered the proximity of their living community to be the most secure environment for

them when compared to other environments in the same municipality or in the country,

even though they considered the inadequate public services and long distances between

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villages and towns problematic. The possible reason for this is that, in general, people

perceive their living environment as the most secure due to emotions linked with

particular locations and the process of life-long experiences at that location which have

made it their home (Oinas, 2012). Hence, the immediate physical environment and

familiar people within or close to it are the cornerstones of the sense of community. The

formal efforts of the regeneration of the sense of community need to pay attention to the

significance of the informal base of social life within rural communities.

In spite of the Finnish plans that look promising on paper and in theory, it ought to

be noted that, unfortunately, there is very little scientific evidence of the impact of these

plans. Although the perceptions in the rural Finland can be verified with surveys and

other observations, there is no sufficient evaluative research of the mechanisms of the

local security management in rural settings. Additionally, the research by Oinas (2012) is

based on observations in two villages and is therefore not representative of the whole

country and its different rural contexts that range from the archipelago in the south west

to the wilderness of Lapland in the north. Thus, until valid research of the processes of

local security planning in the Finnish countryside are produced, the efficacy of the

national policies is questionable.

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5 CONCLUSIONS

This dissertation has analysed experiences of community policing and community

safety policy and strategy implementations in Britain and Finland, both in general and

more particularly in rural settings. It has not concentrated on comparing particular

interventions but examined how the national level strategies have fitted for the purpose,

and how they take into account the past and present political, economical and other

societal structures and processes in different contexts. The examination revealed that the

British and Finnish approaches and their consequences have had similarities, but the

distinctive national settings have eventually resulted in diverging strategies and

contrasting outcomes that demonstrate the significance of context in the implementation

process. However, the following key conclusions can be drawn from the development in

general.

Firstly, both countries have had failures in foreseeing the challenges that the

context can cause for the community policing and safety policy implementations,

although the Finnish model of local security management has been more adaptable than

the British community safety. The mutually corresponding experiences in community

policing reveal that the efforts of implementing the philosophy have suffered from

institutional resistance and implementation failures in both countries. The institutional

resistance has bee due to strong traditions of police work in both countries, but in Britain,

the implementation has lacked because community policing has not attracted the interest

of the people who it is aimed at due to their low trust in the police (Tilley, 2008b). In

Finland, on the contrary, the implementation initially lacked management of change that

was reflected in the attitudes of police professionals towards community policing as the

approach did not meet the need for the change required (Virta, 2002a). Furthermore, the

nature of the British community safety policy formulation demonstrates that the political

steering of local community safety by central government has been strong and has not

given the local implementations a possibility to adapt to the surrounding circumstances.

This is because the formulation was planned for generalisable measures that provide fast

results and prioritise interventions that make use of situational prevention tactics

(Maguire, 2004; Gilling and Schuller, 2007). However, in Finland, the weak impact of

central government has resulted in strong differences between local implementations that

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allow the adaptation to surrounding contexts (Virta, 2002b; Törrönen and Korander,

2005).

Secondly, the British and Finnish community policing and safety policies have

lacked in providing scientifically proven impact on crime in both countries, as the

research on victimisation and police recorded crime has not found evidence of causality

between changes in the levels of crime and the implementation of community policing

and safety (Hope, 2005; Savolainen, 2005). However, the research that is largely based on

people’s perceptions and the researchers’ observations, for instance, supports the

utilisation of partnership approach in local crime control and security provision, despite

the shortcomings in the initial working processes (Phillips, 2002; Virta, 2002b), in the use

of scientific knowledge (Törrönen and Korander, 2005) and in the abilities of partnerships

to recognise the conditions for successful outcomes (Gilling, 2005).

Thirdly, the general experiences imply that in Finland, community-based security

is produced holistically through community development that uses inclusive strategies,

promotes communal activity, and applies social crime prevention measures, which makes

the Finnish vision of community policing and safety social democratic welfarist (Virta,

2002a; Crawford, 2009; Darke, 2011). In contrast, the British vision of community

policing and safety is neo-liberal and authoritarian communitarianist, which relies on

community defence that employs inclusive communities to provide exclusion, supports

situational crime prevention methods, and has harnessed civil legislation to yield social

regulation and control (Edwards and Hughes, 2009; Darke, 2011). Furthermore, these

visions are fundamental in the construction of community policing and safety, and thus

are also present in the implementations in the British and Finnish countryside.

Finally, the British and Finnish experiences of rural community policing and

safety demonstrate that the distinctive societal structures and processes in rural locations

have shaped the outcomes of policy implementations that have been initially used to solve

problems in urban settings. So far, the results have not been convincing, or have not yet

been evaluated. That is, the countryside communities in Britain and Finland –

traditionally portrayed as idyllic, crime-free and safe heavens – are troubled by the

diminishing security, safety and other public services (Mawby, 2004; Oinas, 2012). In

Finland, this has resulted in a growing general insecurity about one’s own safety as well

as the safety of others (Oinas, 2012). On the other hand, in Britain, the decreasing

accessibility to the police is accompanied by the unbalanced relation between the fear of

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crime and the true levels of crime (Gilling, 2010). These rural worries have been

addressed, for example, by the country-wide Neighbourhood Policing strategy that has

brought PCSOs in rural communities. However, PCSOs have encountered difficulties

sourcing from the context of rural social life (Merritt and Dingwall, 2010). In Finland, the

local security management has dealt with local concerns via safety planning that covers

regional, municipal and village levels (Ministry of the Interior, 2011b). Furthermore, the

sense of community has been recognised as a key solution to the general Finnish rural

insecurity, and its regeneration is considered to be achieved through the activity drawn in

the village level safety plans (Oinas, 2012). Nevertheless, the ‘official’ community

building efforts facilitated through local safety planning may be rejected by the

significance of the cornerstones for the sense of community already present in the local

context, namely, the people that care about others and the familiar places called

‘home’ (Oinas, 2012).

Nonetheless, with regard to both Finland and Britain, more research is needed on

the policy and strategy implementations of community policing and safety in the

countryside. Whether the research deals with the delivery of today’s Neighbourhood

Policing in a Cornish village or regeneration efforts of the sense of community in

Viitasaari, only further examination that considers the local context will reveal the most

suitable policies, strategies and practices for rural community policing and safety. At the

moment, many community policing and safety efforts are based on the assumption that

what has worked ‘there’ could also work ‘here’, but the context of social life is not

considered adequately (Edwards and Hughes, 2005). Therefore, the suggestions of the

Finnish Police Commissioner Paatero (Yle News, 2012) should be treated with caution, as

they do not fully take the local settings into account. That is, volunteer neighbourhood

patrols that would act as a substitute for the visible presence of the police in the rural

Finland cannot be directly transferred to the Finnish context on the basis that similar

practices are common in the UK.

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: Ethics Approval

To:! ! TUOMAS SARPAKUNNAS! !

Subject:! Ethical Application Ref: tjs31-8475

! ! (Please quote this ref on all correspondence)

18/02/2013 19:06:20

Criminology Project Title: Comparing Community Policing Strategies and Programmes in Small Communities in Britain and Finland

Thank you for submitting your application which has been considered. This study has been given ethical approval, subject to any conditions quoted in the attached notes. Any significant departure from the programme of research as outlined in the application for research ethics approval (such as changes in methodological approach, large delays in commencement of research, additional forms of data collection or major expansions in sample size) must be reported to your Departmental Research Ethics Officer. Approval is given on the understanding that the University Research Ethics Code of Practice and other research ethics guidelines and protocols will be compiled with

• http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/committees/research-ethics/code-of-practice

• http://www.le.ac.uk/safety/

The following is a record of correspondence notes from your application tjs31-8475. Please ensure that any proviso notes have been adhered to:-

--- END OF NOTES ---!

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