More Police staff become targeted

A growing share of the Police staff has been targeted due to their work, said the National Police Board in a press release on Thursday, quoting a survey.

Targeting may have a negative impact on wellbeing, sense of security and even on the private life of the victims, according to the survey conducted in October.

The aim of the questionnaire made internally was to chart the staff’s experience of and attitudes to targeting during the past three years. A corresponding questionnaire was also made in 2019.

“Targeting of the Police is a serious and growing problem, and we should intervene with all means available to us. The staff is the core resource of the Police, and we must be able to take care of their coping,” said a Deputy National Police Commander of the Police Board.

Among the respondents of the questionnaire, 93 percent found that the Police targeting is a problem while 36 percent reported that they had personally been an object of targeting during the past three years.

Being targeted is a phenomenon that has become somewhat more frequent among the Police. In contrast, 89 percent of the respondents of the 2019 questionnaire found that targeting was a problem and 31 percent had experienced it personally.

The total number of the respondents to this survey, or 842 persons, is a little over eight percent of the entire Police staff. Among them, 67 percent work main in crime prevention or alarm and control operations.

According to Assistant Police Commissioner Mikko Eränen of the Police Board, the outcome of the questionnaire suggest that the most common forms of Police staff targeting include defamation and slandering as well as direct or indirect threatening.

“Other forms, almost as common forms, include collecting and spreading of private information (doxing), extensive and intrusive email campaigns as well as repeated unfounded complaints or Police reports,” he added.

Targeting, however, has still a minor impact on police operations.

“Among the victims of targeting, six percent said the phenomenon had impacted their decision-making or operations in performing their tasks. Only some 0.5 percent of all respondents reported that they had given up an official task or, vice versa, taken up a new task to avoid targeting. However, eight percent of the respondents said they had avoided or tried to avoid tasks with a risk of being targeted,” Eränen added.