‘It´s important – but someone else can do it’ police training and officers’ and students’ understanding and perceptions of crime prevention in Sweden

The proactive shift towards crime prevention in policing has facedresistance and difficulties in implementation. Here, this implementationfailure is explored by analysing how crime prevention is translated andperceived by Swedish police officers and students. As street-levelbureaucrats with high autonomy, police officers’ translations of theirduties can affect how their work is done. Therefore, three focus groupsof Swedish police students and four focus groups of active Swedishpolice officers were convened to discuss their understanding andperception of crime prevention, as well as their education in thissubject. Thematic analysis revealed widely varying translations of crimeprevention, with some being considerably broader than the officialdefinition. Crime prevention was generally acknowledged to beimportant, but other duties were considered more exciting andprioritised. Furthermore, the participants stated that the craft of crimeprevention is learnt while working in the field rather than duringeducation. These findings suggest that police officers’ influence overtheir own work may partly explain the difficulty of incorporating crimeprevention into everyday policing.