Research project Police officers often encounter complex, dynamic, and time-pressured situations. Therefore, knowledge about police decision-making in these contexts is crucial for developing police education as well as supporting effective decision making in complex situations.
The project aims to gain a deeper understanding of police decision-making in complex situations, as well as to identify ways to enhance decision-making performance. The first aim is to develop and validate a temporal occlusion measure for police decision-making, a technique in which video scenarios are intentionally paused at specific time points to assess how officers interpret the available information and make decisions. The second aim is to better understand, through interviews, how patrol police experience and learn decision-making, and whether Swedish police education can be improved.
Police work involves a diverse range of situations, some that are ill-defined and time-pressured, where mistakes can lead to significant consequences. Despite the importance of understanding these issues, there has been limited research focusing on police decision-making in Sweden. This project uses a method called temporal occlusion, which involves presenting videos edited to stop at various points, offering a way to uncover and examine decision-making in real time within these complex situations.
This project aims to gain a better understanding of police decision-making in dynamic, uncertain, and time-pressured situations. This knowledge will be used with the goal of developing a temporal occlusion measure capable of distinguishing between different levels of skill in police decision-making.
The project will also investigate how patrol police officers experience decision-making in various situations they encounter on the job, as well how they perceive their police education has prepared them for such decision-making. By revealing a more nuanced understanding of police decision-making across levels of experience, this project strives to contribute insights and knowledge which can lead to improvements in the police education and operational performance in the field.
Supervisor: Erik Lundkvist
Assistant Supervisors: Stefan Holmström, Annika Johansson
