‘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 faced resistance and difficulties in implementation. Here, this implementation failure is explored by analysing how crime prevention is translated and perceived by Swedish police officers and students. As street-level bureaucrats with high autonomy, police officers’ translations of their duties can affect how their work is done. Therefore, three focus groups of Swedish police students and four focus groups of active Swedish police officers were convened to discuss their understanding and perception of crime prevention, as well as their education in this subject. Thematic analysis revealed widely varying translations of crime prevention, with some being considerably broader than the official definition. Crime prevention was generally acknowledged to be important, but other duties were considered more exciting and prioritised. Furthermore, the participants stated that the craft of crime prevention is learnt while working in the field rather than during education. These findings suggest that police officers’ influence over their own work may partly explain the difficulty of incorporating crime prevention into everyday policing.