300 of the 800 operators needed at the police contact centre are missing. At the same time, the agency has had a strict target that 70 percent of its 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 goal, which was set in 2016, is the main reason why people do not arrive when they call 114 14 to report a crime.
Has counteracted growth
Since the agency has more difficulty recruiting police officers than civilians, the proportion of civilian employees has been higher than 30 percent. In 2020, 38 percent of personnel were civilians.
To stem and counteract that growth, the agency imposed a ban on hiring civilians to reach the target of 70 percent. This has meant that the number of employees at the police's contact center, which primarily consists of civilians, has decreased as no new one has been hired when staff have left. This, in turn, has led to staff shortages and longer response times, according to the study.
In the Stockholm region, the decrease has been 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 economy. The queues outside the bread shops in the former Soviet Union have a sad counterpart in Swedish citizens' telephone queues to report crimes," the researchers write.
Several structural problems
The fact that the police authority has ended up in an "organizational collapse", according to the researchers, stems from a number of structural problems.
The appointment of positions and an internal culture of silence and reprisals, as well as a lack of planning capacity, knowledge view, transparency and respect for laws and regulations are some of these structural problems, according to the report.