Denmark

I had been hoping to have a couple more entries by this point, however the first major disappointment of the trip has arrived.

As you may know, I found it extraordinarily difficult to contact both the Swedish and Danish police forces whilst preparing for this visit. I started last year with our own International Unit – who didn’t have a Danish contact, should have guessed then! Numerous emails to general contact addresses went unanswered before I ended up contacting both the Swedish and Danish Embassies in London to see if they could provide contacts in each country. From this, the Nordic Police Liaison sprang into action, and names were provided for each country. As I hope you read last week, the Swedes were very generous in their assistance, however problems with Denmark remained. I eventually got a named contact at the Politiskolen (Danish Police College) who agreed to facilitate my visit. All was well and several emails went back and forth. Then a few weeks ago, all contact stopped. The fact that this happened just after I’d spent a lot of time writing a detailed study plan for my contact as requested was only part of the annoyance. So for the last few weeks I’ve been trying to re-contact the Politiskolen, and the police in general, with absolutely no luck. Not even a single reply, which is probably the most disappointing part. I wouldn’t have minded if someone had just replied to say a visit wasn’t possible.

So today that led me to doorstop the police at the station in Central Station. This is the only place you can speak to an officer face to face in the city, and is literally a police enquiry office on the concourse of the train station. You stand outside and wait for the officer to open the security door to let you in. I went along armed with four questions I’d written out in my best Google Translate Danish along with my email address and a request that someone look at them and simply email me the answers. They were nothing complicated, just about training. The officer I spoke to unfortunately told me it was too much work and they were too busy, but did give me the name of a department to contact who provide information on the police. As it turns out it’s one I’ve already contacted and received no reply from, but I’ve tried again. The automatic reply says I’ll have a response in five days. I won’t hold my breath.

Regardless, Denmark hasn’t been a complete wash out! On Friday I met Heidi Thamstrup from Autism Denmark. I had previously read an article that she’d written on the system in this country so I was looking forward to meeting her, and she lived up to expectations, giving me another viewpoint on training. In her experience, most of the contact Autism Denmark is having from families and autistic people regarding police interaction is with regard to cybercrime. Four years ago they held a conference with Rebecca Ledingham, who is a senior executive with Mastercard and an expert on cyber security, where she described a study she’d undertaken where 50% of those charged with a cyber or internet crime had autistic traits (not necessarily diagnosed). Heidi mentioned that they’d invited the police to the conference but they didn’t attend (there’s a pattern emerging…).

I asked Heidi if this was more of an issue than police officers being called to incidents with autistic people or others in crisis on the street, and she believed that it was. This is probably a very pertinent issue for us too. In the USA training was focussed on Response officers going to calls about people behaving ‘strangely’ or coming across people having meltdowns and how to deal with them. While I think that knowing how to communicate with and help autistic people in the first moments of police interaction is vital, there are much wider considerations than ‘just’ response officers attending an incident. Do those investigating (cyber) crimes understand autism? How best do you interview autistic witnesses or suspects? How do you gauge an autistic suspect’s intentions when it comes to proving mens rea? This is not an argument that autistic people don’t/can’t commit crime, by the way, but if understanding motivation is an important element of a crime, and it’s an area where autistic people can have problems, it’s an important question to consider. I know that work is being done on this, both in Scotland and in other parts of the UK, but it’s a really interesting aspect of training requirements.

So thank you to Heidi for rescuing the Danish portion of the journey. All has not been lost as Copenhagen is a beautiful place which I have enjoyed exploring over the last few days. It’s cycling infrastructure in particular is something I think Edinburgh should learn from, it’s amazing! Tomorrow I head to the Netherlands where I have a very full few days ahead.