engleski

New police officer profile - Meeting the challenges of the future

Dynamic social changes which occur in the context of development and protection of human rights have brought new demands and challenges towards public services, in particular the police. In order to meet those demands and successfully perform their duties the police must take a new approach and implement new paradigms. Law enforcement is gradually abandoning traditional models, which define police as a conventional law enforcement body that controls the public by using repression. The new approach focuses on new models of policing: the community oriented policing and the intelligence-led policing. The mentioned changes highlight the question of what qualities must a police officer embody in order to meet the new paradigm. The paper will focus on that question by analysing desirable qualities in a police officer. The analysis is based on a survey conducted among three groups of respondents: future police officers, police educators and police managers, i.e. heads of police stations as they are the first superiors to the new police officers. The aim of this paper is to present preliminary results of the first stage of the survey, which was conducted in November and December 2018. The questionnaire covered six dimensions of police skills: the ability to serve and protect, adaptability and flexibility at workplace, task performance, professionalism, decision-making and teamwork. The objectives of this study are to determine whether the current police training program equips officers with all the necessary qualities desirable in the new approach to policing and whether the future superiors and police educators share the same opinion on those qualities. The findings of this study will be of great value to the educational evaluation and the improvement of the police training programs.

police officer profile ; education ; skills ; public service

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