Sweden will tighten the admission requirements for its police training programme from January, adding clearer assessments of applicants' personal maturity and integrity. The change is intended to raise recruitment quality and ensure more officers have the right traits for the job, according to TV4 Nyheterna.
The criminologist Leif GW Persson, professor emeritus, has dismissed the reform as too small to matter and directed sharp criticism at both the police leadership and the police union. "These are marginal changes that are being proposed," he said, according to TV4 Nyheterna.
Why it matters
Sweden faces a substantial shortage of police officers, and the government has set a target of increasing staffing within the Swedish Police Authority. How applicants are selected therefore has direct consequences for how quickly that gap can be closed — and for who ends up doing the work.
Persson's argument is that the new criteria tinker at the edges of a recruitment model that is wrong in its basic design. If he is right, the January changes will do little to address the staffing problem, even as the need for officers remains pressing.
Two qualities Persson says are overlooked
According to TV4 Nyheterna, Persson believes discussions about what makes a good police officer tend to miss two decisive characteristics. One is humour. The other is empathy — specifically, the capacity to imagine another person's difficulties.
He also argues that humour serves a practical function in police work, helping officers keep their composure in stressful situations by creating distance from what they are experiencing.
The new rules place emphasis on maturity and integrity in the selection process. Persson does not dispute that courage and integrity matter, but he contends that the qualities he names are frequently left out of the conversation entirely.
A call for specialised recruitment
Persson's central proposal is that Sweden should recruit differently depending on what officers will actually do. Investigators, in his view, should not have to meet exactly the same requirements as officers working in the field.
He argues that the country is losing capable investigators because physical requirements screen them out. "There are a terrible number of people suited to police investigative work who are dismissed on physical grounds," he said, according to TV4 Nyheterna.
As a comparison, he points to the FBI in the United States, where agent training is considerably shorter but requires an academic degree as a baseline.
Sweden's difficulty, as Persson frames it, is one of volume: the country needs many officers. Broadening the pool of applicants and recruiting people with their future assignments in mind is, in his assessment, an excellent way to do that.
Criticism of the union and the leadership
Persson also takes aim at the Swedish Police Union (Polisförbundet) over its resistance to what the union, as he describes its position, calls "fast tracks." He says the union is acting as a brake in this context.
He does not expect the new admission requirements to make a significant difference given the scale of the staffing need. What he wants instead is a more fundamental rethink — and he is blunt about the current police leadership's capacity to deliver it. "We have to work for the future. We won't get that with the current police leadership, I can guarantee that," he said, according to TV4 Nyheterna.
Alongside the criticism, Persson stresses that Sweden remains one of the safest countries in the world. "Overall, there are few places where the risk of being exposed to serious crime is as low as in Sweden," he said.
What to watch
The stricter admission rules take effect in January. Whether they move the needle on police numbers — or, as Persson predicts, barely register — will become clearer as the first cohorts are selected under the new criteria.
