| dc.description.abstract | In 2006, Denmark implemented a police reform focusing on efficiency, fast response times, local police, and a unified organization across districts (Holmberg, 2019). The reform was necessary due to increased organized crime, rising crime across borders, technology advancements, and public demand for better service (Holmberg, 2014). However, trust and safety decreased in the coming years after the reform and slowly recovered over time, but local policing never recovered (Holmberg, 2014, 2019). The goal of this thesis is to assess the long-term effects of the new policies that came with the police reform in Denmark and to understand the impact of the police reform on dark figures, visibility, reporting, convictions, and trust. I will use a literature review as a method to investigate the Danish police reform and its effect. I will also use system dynamics to present a simulated model of the police reforms implementations and how it affects the dark figures, visibility, reporting, convictions, and trust, which provides important information through feedback loops. The literature review will also be used to find the data needed to model this system. In this study, I have found that an increase in competence, which affects the police detection rate and intervening rate directly, leads to increased convictions, detection, trust, and reports. And the increase in competence will reduce dark figures. With the removal of police stations, as an implementation of the reform, police visibility and police capacity will decrease. This reduces detection rates, convictions, and trust and will increase the dark figures. The increase in competence does show positive behavior but is unable to compensate for the effects that the loss of police stations has on visibility. The importance of visibility should be accounted for when implementing such policies. The study further discusses the model-based insights that can help create new policy implementations, to enhance the outcomes of the dark figures, visibility, reporting, convictions, and trust. The policies are tested by increasing or decreasing them percentwise, so eventually, new policy implementation can be based on the accessibility they have to change the different policy options found in the study. | |
