Northern Police Research Webinar – Finland: The Cost Disease Theory – Shedding Light on a Dark-Blue Undercurrent of Law Enforcement

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Fri 29 Nov 2024 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM GMT Online, Microsoft Teams

Presenter: Matti Vuorensyrjä

The rate of growth of labor productivity is much lower in criminal investigation and in surveillance and emergency operations than in permits and licenses services of the police. Why? Why police agencies keep on struggling with constrained budgets, even when appropriations are growing? Why is it that reform programs involving budget cuts and downsizing so often result in deteriorating quality of services in law enforcement, especially in terms of accessibility? Why is it that the staffs working in the legacy duties of the police tend to suffer from time pressure and from the associated symptoms of stress and burnout? In the current study we review and further analyze some of the wide-ranging implications of the cost disease theory.

Matti Vuorensyrjä’s scholarly background derives from studies in economics, political science, mathematics, and statistics, on the one hand, and in history, philosophy, Latin and Roman literature, on the other hand. For the last 16 years he has worked at Police University College of Finland as a senior planning officer and researcher. However, Matti has approximately 30 years of scholarly research experience altogether with publications, for example, in European Journal of Policing Studies, Policing (Emerald), Policing (OUP), Police Practice and Research, and Constitutional Political Economy, not to mention a more exotic journals, such as Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Technological change has been a recurring theme in Matti’s career and in the corresponding paper trail. Of the earliest papers worth mentioning are

• Neoclassical Convergence Hypothesis and Endogenous Technological Change (1993, in Finnish),
• Why the Age of the Smart Machine Never Came? (2000, in Finnish), and
• Non-Neutrality of Information Technology, Heterogeneity of Human Capital, and Inequality (2002).

More recent papers include:

• Efficiency Analysis with a View to Productivity Improvements – A Review of DEA Applications in Law Enforcement (2013),
• Organizational Reform in a Hierarchical Frontline Organization (2014),
• Police Management Reform, Labor Productivity, and Citizens’ Evaluation of Police Services (2018),
• The Cost Disease Blues¾Do the Police Suffer from Baumol’s Cost Disease? (2021), and
• Downsizing and Recovery: Perceived Quality of Police Services in Finland Before, During, and After Three Major Police Management Reform Programs (2023).

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