300 of the 800 operators needed at the police contact center are missing. At the same time, the authority has had a strict goal that 70 percent of the staff should be trained police officers and 30 percent should be civilians.
Police researchers Johannes Knutsson and Stefan Holgersson show in a report that this target, which was set in 2016, is the main reason why people do not arrive when they call 114 14 to report a crime.
Has hindered growth
Because the authority has more difficulty recruiting police officers than civilians, the percentage of civilian employees has been higher than 30 percent. In 2020, 38 percent of the staff were civilians.
To stop and counteract that growth, the authority introduced a hiring freeze on civilians to reach the goal of 70 percent. This has meant that the number of employees at the police contact centre, which is primarily made up of civilians, has decreased as no one was hired when staff left. Something that in turn led to staff shortages and longer response times, according to the study.
In the Stockholm region, the reduction has been the greatest, where in 2022 there were 36 percent fewer PKC operators than in 2017.
“The police authority’s approach is in fact similar to planned economic thinking. The queues outside bread shops in the old Soviet Union have a sad counterpart in Swedish citizens’ telephone queues to report crimes,” write the researchers.
Several structural problems
The fact that the police authority has ended up in an “organizational collapse”, the researchers believe, is rooted in a number of structural problems.
The appointment of services and an internal culture of silence and retaliation, as well as a lack of planning ability, knowledge, transparency and respect for laws and regulations are some of these structural problems according to the report.
