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This study is about police students’ and professional police officers’ experienced competence in mental preparation training. The aim with the study is to compare how police students’ in the beginning and in the end of the Basic Training Programme for Police Officers perceive their competence in mental preparation training and how a selection of these students perceive their competence after one respectively two and a half year as police officers. The aim is also to compare the formal competence required of students who have passed the Basic Training Programme for Police Officers with the competence students actually think they have, and the formal competence required within the police profession with the competence police officers with differently long time as professionals experience that they have. Moreover the study includes a comparison between the formal and experienced competence in the Basic Training Programme for Police Officers and in the police profession. The empirical data of the study is based on a web questionnaire to the different groups of students and follow-up interviews with a selection of these students. The results show that the students’ perceived competence increases during the Basic Training Programme and that the experienced competence at the end of the programme to a relatively large extent corresponds to the formal competence of the programme. The difference between the formal competence required in the police profession and the police officers’ experienced competence is relatively small. The police officers’ experience though is that their competence in mental preparation training is not requested in the profession to any larger extent.

Key words: Police, competence, mental preparation training.

This study is part of the European cooperation project, Recruitment, Education, and Career in the Police. The overall aim of this study is to compare how Swedish and Catalan police students perceive different competence dimensions in relation to their future profession, and how the perceptions of these competence dimensions change from the beginning to the end of the training program. The empirical data is based on identical questionnaires that were distributed to police students in Sweden and Catalonia. The results show different patterns in how Catalan and Swedish police students perceive the importance of the different competences at the beginning and at the end of their basic training programs. The implications of this study show that more knowledge is needed about the next step; that is, how the police students use these competencies in their professional work.

The aim of the present follow-up study on a cohort of Swedish police students is to build knowledge of how they now as police officers perceive the importance of competencies like specific knowledge, practical skills, and reflexivity in relation to their police work. The aim is also to study whether the importance of these competence dimensions has changed from the time of their police education to their police work. To what extent do the respondents perceive that their police education has contributed to the development of certain competence dimensions? Based on both qualitative and quantitative data, the results show that respondents in their roles as police officers estimate the importance of the competencies’ specific knowledge, practical skills, and reflexivity higher than they did as police students. The results also show that in general, police education’s contributions to the development of these competencies are clearly lower than the extent to which they are perceived as important for work as police officers. In the interviews, reflections on the reasons for this indicate a discrepancy between the educational and occupational contexts. A conclusion from this study is that the police occupational culture seems to affect police students more than the formal police education. Another conclusion is that police education needs to clarify the difference between the educational practice designed to optimize a learning situation and the occupational practice in which knowledge should be applied.