Police year 2018: Prioritisation reflected in results

The number of urgent calls received by the police increased last year. A spike was particularly evident in the early hours around the closing time of restaurants.

A total of 795,055 crimes were reported to the police last year, a decrease of slightly over 27,000 crimes from the previous year. The police received a total of 1,062,930 urgent calls, which constitutes an increase of slightly more than 7,600 calls over 2017.

According to National Police Commissioner Seppo Kolehmainen , the police did a good job in 2018, taking into account the discrepancy between the police’s duties and appropriations.

“In the end, society decides the duties and resources assigned to public officials. This evaluation process is presently under way in Parliament and the Ministry of the Interior, among other places. In addition to combating crime, response times to urgent calls have been the subject of discussion. Investments in preventive work and surveillance are also needed”, Kolehmainen says.

The main task of the police is to reconcile operations with finances. The challenges to this include shrinking resources, changes in the operating environment and new obligations imposed by legislation.

According to Kolehmainen, the police’s visibility and capability as a provider of everyday security could be guaranteed with relatively small additional appropriations from central government finances.

“It would be much more economical for society to prevent crimes and disturbances in advance, instead of investigating them expensively after the fact. This is ultimately a question of upholding civil security, not the needs of the police. Every citizen has the right to be safe, after all”, he continues.

Slight increase in recorded criminal offences

The total number of criminal offences increased slightly from 2017. Most of this growth is explained by an increase in traffic offences.

The police received fewer reports of criminal offences (with the exception of traffic), a trend that has continued for several years now. Reports of criminal offences (excl. traffic) have decreased by nearly 20 percent from 2008.

However, this does not necessarily reflect a genuine decrease in crime, as the threshold for reporting crimes may have risen. This can be partly due to citizens feeling that the police do not have time to investigate every crime, prompting them to leave crimes unreported.

According to the National Police Commissioner, it must be acknowledged that the lack of resources available to the police forces them to prioritise, sometimes quite drastically.

“The police are focusing their resources on serious crimes against life and health and on urgent calls. Those resources have to be taken from somewhere, which manifests as longer investigations, fewer pairs of eyes on detection, criminal intelligence and analysis, and less police vehicles seen by people in their everyday lives”, says Seppo Kolehmainen.

Growth in domestic burglaries

The decrease in reported property offences has continued, with nearly three percent fewer reports received in 2018 than in the previous year.

But reports of domestic burglaries grew by nearly 27 percent from 2017. On the other hand, the reported number of burglaries targeting vacation homes, commercial properties or motor vehicles decreased. The number of financial crimes reported to the police also fell by slightly more than 19 percent.

D rug offenders younger than before

The number of narcotics offences reported to the police increased by approximately nine percent from 2017, the majority being offences involving the use of drugs. Another indication of the growth in drug use is that more and more cases of drunk driving are caused by the use of narcotics.

The waste water studies conducted by the National Institute for Health and Welfare in certain cities and a narcotics survey also point to an increase in drug use. On the other hand, the number of recorded aggravated narcotics offences decreased from 2017.

Reports on narcotics offences are not a direct measure of the amount of narcotics-related crime, however. Changes in the ecosystem of narcotics crime and the trafficking of narcotic substances over anonymous internet services has made the detection of these crimes more difficult.

The fact that younger and younger people are caught using drugs requires close cooperation between authorities to make the young person stop the abuse of narcotics. Several police departments have multidisciplinary teams for achieving this in cooperation with social services and health care (Ankkuri).

Fewer assaults reported, number of sex offences continues to grow

The total number of violent crimes reported decreased slightly from 2017. More than half of assaults occurred on private properties. Assaults in public places have decreased by approximately three percent. On the other hand, assaults committed on private properties increased by nearly the same amount. The number of aggravated assaults recorded also grew from the previous year.

The clearance rate of violent crime fell from 2017. The clearance rates of such crimes have been high, and the realised rate for 2018 was close to 64 percent. The figure has been on the decline for a number of years, however. In 2014, almost three out four assaults were solved.

The number of sexual offences reported to the police has been growing for the past decade, and this trend appears to be continuing. The number of sexual offences reported grew by nearly 15 percent from 2017.

A total of 1,400 reports of sexual abuse of a child were recorded in 2018, which constitutes an increase of almost 18 percent from the previous year. The numbers of reported rapes and other sexual offences also grew.

National Police Commissioner Kolehmainen emphasises that these figures represent the crimes reported to the police.

“The sexual abuse of children, for example, is a widespread phenomenon, and not every suspected crime is reported to the police. This is a typical category of hidden crime. More and more often, the internet is somehow related to the offences – today’s paedophiles operate online. We require more education and surveillance to prevent and detect these offences”, he says.

Longer investigation times and lower clearance rates

The investigation time of criminal law offences (excl. traffic offences) was 130 days, which is four days more than in 2017. The clearance rate of criminal law offences (excl. traffic) decreased slightly from the previous year, but was still better than in 2016. More criminal law offences (excl. traffic) reported ‘dark’ were solved than in 2017.

National Police Commissioner Kolehmainen points out that the operating environment of the police has gone through rapid changes in the past five years.

Finland’s internal security is tied to the security situations of our neighbours and other EU Member States, and increasingly also to global phenomena. Immigration, counter-terrorism and hybrid threats are key themes in this regard.

The National Police Commissioner points out that the police are managing these threats but, at the same time, they must secure the capacity for basic police work and other tasks appointed to a general authority operating everywhere in the nation, from international financial crime to issuing licences and permits, and from homicides committed by organised criminals to local precinct patrols.

“The duties of the police have expanded and become more complex, and the competence requirements of police work have increased correspondingly. These developments are permanent, and social changes are having an impact on basic police work. The technical and legal requirements of criminal investigations have increased, which makes solving individual cases more challenging. Clearing the backlog would require more brains and hands”, he says.

Foreign nationals accounted for a greater number of criminal offences where the perpetrator was known, in terms of both number and percentage. The trend was similar in nearly all types of crime. The percentage of foreign nationals among injured parties has also increased, and these developments are a natural consequence of the greater number of foreign nationals residing and becoming established in Finland.

Police took care of urgent calls

The number of urgent calls received by the police increased in comparison to the previous year. In 2018, the total number of urgent calls received by the police was 1,062,930.

The number of urgent calls decreased by approximately three percent. On the other hand, police were called in more non-urgent cases than in 2017. Calls concerning traffic accidents, traffic in general, fires and accident prevention increased from the previous year. The hot and dry summer caused wildfires, which resulted in more calls recorded for the police.

The number of urgent calls received in the early hours, between 5 and 6 a.m., grew by more than ten percent. This development is at least partially due to the changes in alcohol legislation, which allow restaurants to serve alcohol until four a.m. Several police departments reacted to the increase of night calls by changing their shift lists.

Despite the scarcity of resources, the average response time to urgency A and B calls even improved slightly from 2017, and the police were able to almost maintain the level of 2017 in urgency A calls.

Domestic calls decreased from the previous year, as did the number of reported cases of domestic violence.

More efficient allocation of traffic surveillance resources

The total number of traffic offences recorded increased from the previous year, but the number still remained below that of 2016.

The share of aggravated cases of causing a traffic hazard in the total number of traffic hazard cases has been on the rise for several years. In 2000, a total of 2.5 percent of all cases of causing a traffic hazard were aggravated, while the corresponding figure was 5.8 percent in 2018. This change is largely due to the fact that the total number of recorded cases of causing a traffic hazard has decreased significantly, while the number of aggravated cases recorded has remained nearly the same.

Approximately 19,000 drunk drivers were caught in 2018. This is the highest recorded rate of drunk driving since the early 2010s. Police breathalysed fewer drivers, but a greater percentage of them were found to be drunk.

The efficiency of drunk driving surveillance has improved, since more drunk drivers are being caught in relation to the number of drivers breathalysed. Driving under the influence of narcotics has increased significantly. In the early 2010s, roughly 80 percent of cases were caused by alcohol alone, while the current figure is down to 60 percent. This observation is also corroborated by the increase in offences involving the use of drugs.

The increase in automated camera surveillance and focusing of traffic surveillance had the effect of increasing output. Nearly 607,000 sanctions were issued on the basis of automated traffic surveillance. Roughly half of these were warnings and the majority of the remainder summary penal fees.

The growth of traffic volumes increased further in 2018, and the number of registered vehicles is also growing steadily. According to a study conducted by the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, the incidence of speeding has declined on public roads, as has the frequency of vehicles speeding past monitoring posts. According to the preliminary data, the numbers of dead and injured in traffic accidents have decreased slightly from 2017.

Record number of identity cards issued

The police issued a total of 1,109,192 licences and permits in 2017. More licences were issued in nearly every category.

In 2018, the number of identity cards issued grew by approximately 34 percent. Roughly 48,000 identity cards were issued in December alone, which is nearly four times as much as in the December of 2017.

Identity cards have grown in popularity, partly due to increased marketing.

The Act on Strong Electronic Identification and Electronic Signatures, or Identification Act, was amended at the end of 2017, and driving licences were no longer accepted as identification when applying for a strong electronic identification device.

This has also engendered a false notion that driving licences will not be accepted as identification documents for any services any more. The amendments to the Identification Act have nevertheless increased the need for identity cards, and the resulting public discussion has increased the public’s awareness of identity cards and their features.

Police statistics for 2018 pdf, 201,8 kB

Police statistics for 2018, crimes comitted by foreign nationals pdf, 200,8 kB

Police statistics for 2018, asylum seekers pdf, 289,7 kB