HE POLICE EDUCATION AND TRAINING SYSTEM IN CROATIA: WHAT DO POLICE OFFICERS THINK ABOUT IT?
HE POLICE EDUCATION AND TRAINING SYSTEM IN CROATIA: WHAT DO POLICE OFFICERS THINK ABOUT IT?

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the Croatian police education and training system, including a comparison of the police officers‘ attitudes towards it before the adoption of the Community Policing Strategy in 2002, and at the beginning of 2016. In 2003, experts from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior developed a new strategy for police activities called the Croatian Community Policing Strategy, as the planned process of change to be implemented over an extended period of time, which required a high level of interconnection between policing theory and practice and active participation of all police resources. The ultimate goal of this reform process was to transform the Croatian traditional policing model into a community policing model that was compatible with EU standards of modern democratic policing. The reform of the police education and training system was one of six projects within the framework of the Community Policing Strategy launched by the Croatian Ministry of the Interior in 2003. There is the question to what extent the project was successful, which is important for the evaluation of the overall reforms of the Croatian police, since no viable system change is possible without adequate changes in the system of education and training. A representative sample of 500 Croatian police officers from six police administrations participated in the 2002 and 2016 surveys. The respondents evaluated the level of their satisfaction with the system of police education, system of in-service training, training in the use of firearms, special physical training, as well as with their own professional competences to perform their job. The collected data are compared on a descriptive level. The obtained results reveal that Croatian police officers are still not satisfied with the police education and training system in Croatia. Half of the respondents evaluated the training in the use of firearms and the special physical training as very bad or bad. Almost the same holds true for their overall assessment of the police education and in-service training. Community policing requires substantial changes at the police organization level. Based on the data presented in this paper, it is obvious that police officers in Croatia are today almost equally dissatisfied with the police education and training system as they were 15 years ago. This fact deserves more detailed future research, especially in relation to the substantial body of research that shows great positive changes in the Croatian police in terms of its democratization and serving the citizens, as well as in evaluations in which police officers give significantly better grades to concrete police courses at the Police Academy.

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