Police facing loss of 600 posts in years ahead
Government productivity programme threatens operative policing work and criminal investigations
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The Finnish police are facing the prospect of having to reduce staff by between 600 and 700 person-years as a result of the government’s policy programme on increasing the productivity of the various administrative branches and implementing reforms of the central public administration, according to Yrjö Suhonen.
Suhonen is President of the SPLJ, a union representing the interests of more than 12,000 police officers and professionals in the judicial administration and the emergency services.
According to the government programme, the police will have to shave off 447 permanent positions by 2001.
The full programme should be implemented by 2015, by which time the remainder of the job cuts would need to be made.
The number of jobs up for removal is so great that in Suhonen’s view there is no way the cuts can be made by so-called natural wastage - which is one of the principles underpinning the productivity programme.
The state’s principle is also that nobody should be made redundant as a result of the programme, which leaves - according to Suhonen - only the alternative of not filling positions as they become vacant. This will mean unemployment for some police officers.
Suhonen also charges that the planned reductions cannot help but have an adverse impact on police field work and the investigation of crimes - again in direct contrast to the conditions set by the Ministry of the Interior.
"All of those security clauses to the effect that the productivity programme will not affect practical police operations, they can simply be forgotten", says Suhonen.
The final impact on the police forces, reaching through to 2015, has not been firmed up as yet, but the Director of the Ministry of the Interior’s Finance Unit Jukka Aalto commented that the reductions are more or less on the scale Suhonen describes.
"Time will tell how we can manage this", says Aalto. He admits that at some point "there is a limit we come up against", where the effects will be felt in operative police work, even though the ministry has sought to avoid such a scenario.
The previous coalition government led by the Centre Party and the Social Democrats resolved to initiate a programme to streamline the productivity and efficiency of general government and services.
At the end of the outgoing government’s four-year term, the figure for the number of posts to be removed was set at 9,600 by 2011.
The incoming centre-right government headed by the Centre Party and the moderate conservative National Coalition Party added a further 4,800 jobs to the list.
The current government has recently agreed that the new cuts would be made in the period from 2012-2015, following calls from Parliament that the later cuts be transferred to the following government term after elections in 2011.
The SPLJ’s Suhonen does not find this last piece of news overly comforting.
According to the information he has received back from police chiefs in the various regions, it will already be an impossible exercise even to cut the 447 positions promised by 2011. Suhonen says the effects of the streamlining programme will mean that queues for licences issued by the police forces will get progressively longer and patrols will be ordered to cover ever-larger areas as local police forces are inevitably merged to reduce running costs.
Service points in remote areas will be closed down, he says, and there will have to be compromises made in crime prevention work.
Policemen and policewomen will increasingly find themselves having to deal with paperwork over and above their field duties, as the office staff numbers are thinned out.
"It looks to me as though there is the belief out there that in the future we will all be doing better and better quality work with a smaller crew, more efficiently, and with everyone in the best of health. I don’t believe this is equation is possible in the real world", says Suhonen.
He acknowledges that as the population ages, there will have to be improvements in productivity.
The supply of labour will decline, and an increasingly large share of elderly people outside the workforce will need to be taken care of by an increasingly small number of people of working age.
At the same time, however, improving police productivity in this fashion very quickly has an impact on internal security, Suhonen warns. Furthermore there are quite obvious limits to the degree to which technology can be used to replace office routines.
"To take just one example, you can hardly go putting firearms licence services on the Net. It is simply not possible to turn the police into some kind of self-service enterprise."
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 18.1.2008 - TODAY |
 Police facing loss of 600 posts in years ahead |
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