The police officer’s interpretation of public safety, cooperation skills and the definition of public safety problems in Fejér County based on interviews with police leaders

Abstract

Aim: As part of the doctoral research of Árpád Budavári, the authors investigated the understanding of security, the definition of security problems and the willingness to cooperate of police officers by surveying the police officers of the Fejér County Police Headquarters in 2021 and 2022, and by interviewing police managers. The interviews were also used to examine the organisational change needs of police managers.
Methodology: According to the hypothesis of the research, a police reform focusing on the decentralization, demilitarization and depolitization of the police is not the necessarily way to renew the Hungarian police force. The police show signs of cooperative problem solving with the communities of society, and the intervention needs can be identified, which can lead to the development of the problem sensitivity and cooperative competences of the police. The interviews with 19 heads of the county police headquarters, which were conducted to examine these hypotheses, form an evaluable unit in themselves, which are summarised in this paper.
Findings: The county's police leaders show a unified image in that they pay attention to the signals coming from the protected communities when dealing with public safety problems, their cooperation skills with the communities have developed and have become part of their daily work. They rate the large number of central tasks as a significant difficulty. At the same time, there is a lack of unity of will and demand for change in the police organisation, neither in terms of the fact of change nor in terms of the way it should be implemented.
Value: The experience of the interviews can be used as an input for the police diagnosis of the present conditions and the needs for change by exploring the police officers' willingness to cooperate and their attitude to change.