Educating and training police officers requires cooperation – and opens up new opportunities

In October, a Vice-Chancellor’s decision was made to establish the new police education and training programme, as a new department within the Faculty of Law, with the participation of other faculties within and outside the disciplinary domain. The English Park will be the main campus for the programme, and the Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences is responsible for facilities matters.

The police education and training programme is a vital social matter and concerns the whole University. We are very glad to be able to take on this commission and that we have been entrusted with it. It gives us opportunities to provide professional qualification education in a new area and challenges us to broaden our research in the areas of crime and crime prevention. Clearly however, it also requires major adjustments, especially for some staff. We also need to analyse how this might affect the students in their daily lives at the University.

The fact that it gives us a broader economic base with which to bear our joint costs means that we can manage our finances better in our disciplinary domain, which benefits both students and staff. If we can reduce our facilities costs – or at least avoid ongoing increases in these – that allows us to safeguard the quality of the teaching while freeing up resources for research.

We are now driving this process forward with the help of a steering group, where I am chair and which includes the directors of the Building, Human Resources and Planning divisions together with the Faculty Offices of Law and Social Sciences. The steering group will manage the actual implementation – the organisation and content of the instruction. We can see that having the support of our regular activities is crucial to assure quality in the instruction and to benefit from professional qualification education having its home in our disciplinary domain. The new programme also involves broad cooperation outside the University, in particular with the Swedish Police Authority, from which several of the teaching staff will be hired.

This matter also needs to be addressed with the help of the disciplinary domain’s facilities planning committee. Deputy Vice Rector Mattias Martinson chairs this committee, with help from the directors of our four campus areas and a student representative is also included.

How do we deal with risks and concerns along the way? This is a process that needs to go much faster than we are used to. We need to make space for the police programme and moving departments and activities is of course an inconvenience for everyone involved. In dialogue with those affected, we aim to support both managers and staff to reduce all negative impact and find really good solutions, in particular for the long term.

Risk and impact assessments on all major changes will be carried out, and we aim to be as sympathetic as we can to views that come in along the way. After all, it’s not just the departments that need to move that are affected. We need to reduce the vacancy rate on all campuses in the disciplinary domain, and this has consequences that need to be addressed in the best way possible.

There are many benefits with this new commission. But it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of sacrifices to get there. So that the important activities pursued in our disciplinary domain can continue in the meantime, we are keen to do this work in a way that is reasonable for all. With our joint commitment to get the police programme in place and up and running, I foresee great opportunities to develop both our education and research – and actually strengthen the disciplinary domain as a whole.

Joakim Palme, Vice Rektor