The Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior is considering a plan to set up a network of police service points around the country.
The service points are seen as necessary for tasks that the regional emergency response centres do not deal with. These include taking down information of crimes, and giving advice to citizens.
A few service centres have already been set up, some of them are responsible for the camera surveillance of city centres.
On Thursday a 24-hour service centre was opened in Lahti on an experimental basis. The aim is to see what kinds of services residents need in addition to urgent emergency calls.
The service centre is where citizens will be able to file criminal complaints, bring found property, and receive advice.
The replacement of the old police call centres by regional emergency call centres left a gap of sorts. Local police have to deal with issues that the regional emergency centres do not handle.
By 2006, police call centres and municipal emergency call centres will have been replaced by a network of 15 general emergency call centres all responding to the emergency number 112.
Although the separate police service points are supposed to complement the work of the emergency call centres, Jukka Landstedt, the head of the Emergency Response Centre Administration, fears that there could be a risk of overlapping, and duplicated work.
