The police intensified monitoring of disturbance areas

The police conducted intensified supervision of public order and security in the areas of all police departments in Finland during the first three weeks of September from 1 to 21 September 2025. The surveillance campaign collected observations on issues such as the occurrence of various intoxicants in the areas of the police departments.

Visible and effective monitoring

The surveillance especially concerned sites where disturbance typically occurs, selected from within the police departments on the basis of analysis. These sites cause the most disturbance to the surroundings regionally and statistically. The target sites were, for example, areas popular among young people, urban areas, public areas related to shopping centres and areas in front of restaurants. The areas for intensified surveillance were ones where, based on the analysis carried out, the effectiveness of the surveillance is likely to be the greatest.

The principle of the surveillance was to monitor public places in a visible manner and with maximum effectiveness. The surveillance campaign was not communicated in advance in public.

In the whole of Finland, the police used a total of 7,000 work hours on the surveillance campaign and there were a total of about 5,000 surveillance events, which means that the input in the campaign was quite significant. The duration of the surveillance events was often rather short, but in terms of quantity, there were many of them.

The police collected observations of the occurrence of intoxicants in different parts of Finland

Particular attention was paid to the number of different intoxicants and their users in different areas. One of the targets was the alpha-PVP narcotic, which has recently received a lot of media attention, and its amounts in public areas.

According to the figures collected by the National Police Board, almost 5,000 people were removed from the scene during the surveillance and a total of 465 people were apprehended for various reasons. The selected disturbance sites were areas where people often gather, and therefore the number of people removed from the sites is quite high. The most common reasons for apprehensions were disorderly behaviour when removal from the scene was not a sufficient measure, or possession of narcotics and the resulting criminal process.

A total of just under 300 grams of alpha-PVP, nearly two kilograms of amphetamine, more than a kilogram of marijuana and a total of about 3500 different medication pills were seized. Other intoxicants were also seized by the police, but the above-mentioned substances and quantities were the most common. Alpha-PVP was found especially in the areas of police departments in southern Finland, but it was not found in the areas of the Oulu, Lapland and Ostrobothnia police departments, for example, during the surveillance campaign.

One of the purposes of the surveillance campaign was to obtain observations on the proportion of different intoxicants in places of disturbance and on the presence of intoxicants in the areas of different police departments. The police departments will independently analyse the results of the surveillance campaign in their own area and allocate their surveillance resources based on the analyses. In the future, the nation-wide results of the surveillance period carried out for the first time in this form will be compared with similar campaigns to be carried out in the future.