Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Although studies on police attitudes in Finland are quite scarce, the attempt to understand police cadets' attitudes has received even less empirical attention. It is generally assumed that police and ethnic minorities' relations brim with mutual suspicions. The empirical research literature supports this assumption that this relationship is filled with mutual misconceptions. Using a questionnaire, we tried to test these hypotheses through the responses of police cadets who had spent the mandatory 2.5 years of police cadet training in the Finnish Police School. This was in addition to a voluntary in-depth interview on a one-to-one basis. The questionnaire was introduced to two sets of graduating police cadet students in their classrooms. The questionnaire used contained a set of questions, which were used to extract information from the respondents in order to gain a broader understanding of police cadet attitudes towards their contacts with African immigrants in Finland. Using SPSS statistical analysis, the results suggest that there has been little contact between police cadets and African immigrants in Finland and, as a result, mutual suspicion is rife. In addition, the relationship between the police cadets and African immigrants is quite different across age, gender, education, and language skills of police cadets. In other words these variables operated in unexpected ways, which run directly counter to well-accepted assumptions regarding the police and African immigrants in Finland. These police cadets' views could offer us an important insight into the larger police force

Keywords

Cadets' attitude Police African immigrants Racism in Finland

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Asemota

S. A.

(1993). Policing under civilian and military administration. In Tamuno

T. N.

Bashir

I. L.

Alemika

E. E. O.

Akano

A. O.

(Eds.), Policing Nigeria. Lagos: Malthouse Press (pp. 59–100).

Brigham

J. C.

(1971). Ethnic stereotypes: Psychological Bulletin, 76, 15–30.

Brewer

J. D.

(1991). Inside the RUC. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brown

Willis

(1985). Authoritarianism in British police recruits: Importation, socialisation or myth? Journal of Occupational Psychology, 58, 97–108.

Brown

(1995). Organisational Culture. London: Pitman Publishing.

Chan

J. B. L.

(1997). Changing police culture. London: Cambridge University Press.

Colman

Gorman

(1982). Conservatism, dogmatism and authoritarianism in British police officers. Sociology, 16, 1–11.

Daniell

(2001). The Conference of Commissioners of Police of Australia and the South-West Pacific Region. Brisbane, 25–26 October.

Ehrlich

H. J.

(1973). The social psychology of prejudice. New York: Wiley.

10.

Ellison

Smyth

(2000). The crowned harp: Policing Northern Ireland. London: Pluto Press.

11.

Fielding

(1991). Policing attitude to crime and punishment. British Journal of Criminology, 31, 39–53.

12.

Fielding

(1988a). Joining forces. London: Routledge.

13.

Finnish Police School (2001). Annual report. Retrieved from: www.poliisikoulu.fi (accessed 12 December 2005).

14.

Holdaway

(1983). Inside the British police. Oxford: Blackwell.

15.

Holdaway

(1991). Race relations and police recruitment. British Journal of Criminology, 31, 365–82.

16.

Hofstede

(1997). Cultures and organisations: Software of the mind. New York: McGraw Hill.

17.

James

Warren

(1995) Police Culture. In Bessant

Carrington

Cook

, (Eds.) Cultures of Crime and Violence: The Australian Experience, L Trobe University Press, Bundoora, Victoria, pp. 3–15.

18.

Lijphart

(1995). The Northern Ireland problem. British Journal of Political Science, 5, 83–106.

19.

Manning

P.K.

(1977). Police work, the social organisation of policing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

20.

Mapston

(1992). The attitude of the police in a divided society: The case of Northern Ireland. The British Journal of Criminology, 32(2), 183–192.

21.

McGarry

O'Leary

(1999). Policing Northern Ireland: Proposals for a new start. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.

22.

McSweeney

(2002). Hofstede's model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith – a failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55(1), 89–118.

23.

Moore

(1972). Race relations in the six countries, Race, 14, 21–42.

24.

Pitkanen

Kouki

(1999). Meeting foreign cultures: A survey of the attitudes of Finnish authorities towards immigrants and immigration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(1), 103–118.

25.

Prenzler

(1997). Is there a police culture? Australian Journal of Public Administration, 56(4), 47–56.

26.

Reiner

(1985). The politics of the police, Brighton: Wheatsheaf.

27.

Reiner

(2000). The politics of the police (3rd Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

28.

Scarman Report (1981). The Brixton Disorders, 10–12 April 1981, Cmd 8427. London: Home Office.

29.

Skolnick

J. H.

(1966). Justice without trial. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

30.

Skolnick

J. H.

Fyfe

J. J.

(1993). Above the law: Police and excessive use of force. New York: The Free Press.

31.

Smith

(1983). Police and people in London: A survey of Londoners. London: Policy Studies Institute.

32.

Smith

(1991). The origins of black hostility to the police. Policing and Society. 2, 1–15.

33.

Smith

Gray

(1985). Police and people in London. Aldershot: Gower.

34.

Statistics Finland, Finland in figures – population (2004). Retrieved from: www.Tilastokeskus.fi/tk/tp/tasku/taskue_vaest.html (accessed 10 November 2004).

35.

Stephan

W. G.

(1985). Intergroup relations. In Lindsey

Aronson

(Eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology (Vol. 3). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

36.

Wood

J. R. T.

(1997). Royal Commissioner into the New South Wales Police Service, Final Report, Volume one: Corruption. Sydney: NSW Government.

37.

Wortley

R. K.

(1992). Police Prejudice, Discrimination and Socialisation: An Attributional Perspective. School of Behavioural Sciences: Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Are Finnish Police Racists? A Critical Analysis of Police Cadets' Attitudes towards African Immigrants in Finland

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References