Operational management during transboundary crises within the Norwegian police

Rotseth, Freddy (2022) Operational management during transboundary crises within the Norwegian police. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effective organisation of Norwegian police crisis management in the last two decades. Effective crisis management requires contributions from a range of actors, starting with those directly affected and those set to respond to a crisis. In the aftermath of a crisis, the public debate tends to focus on the tactical, hands-on, and strategic levels. At the tactical level, success is often measured by reponders’ ability to solve the crisis. In contrast, the assessment at the strategic and political levels often focuses on how politicians and senior management within the police have prioritised societal security and preparedness. This thesis focuses on the operational level in crisis management because this area has received much less attention. At this level, responders need to allocate the right resources, to the right place, at the right time. The conceptual framework driving this study develops our understanding of operational level requirements, specifically in crises involving more the one police district. The outline broadly follows the Norwegian police's three-phase model of crisis management: from preparation, to adaptation when the crisis peaks, to normalisation. The research unpacks these three phases into a series of dimensions that are extracted from evaluations of two major crises: the 22 July 2011 attacks and the attack against the mosque in Bærum in August 2019. The core of the thesis posits that operational success in crisis management requires: a timely, relevant and reliable threat picture, a good understanding of all available resources and appropriate planning, and an ability to coordinate relevant elements of the response, for example, through suitable communication technologies. The thesis investigates these requirements in the specific context of Norway, a small and relatively peaceful country whose police forces have recently undergone significant reforms. These reforms have reduced the number of police districts from 54 to 12. This centralisation has favoured the emergence of fewer but more robust operations centres, whose changing crisis management roles and capacities are analysed. The analysis identifies several improvements in Norwegian police crisis management over the last decade. These improvements concern threat assessments, contingency plans, modern communication technology and the scope and understanding of available resources. However, the police's ability to coordinate at the operational level is not entirely appropriate when crises involve more than one police district.

• Item Type: Thesis (MPhil(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities
• Supervisor's Name: Van Puyvelde, Dr. Damien
• Date of Award: 2022
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2022-83230
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 26 Oct 2022 15:43
• Last Modified: 26 Oct 2022 15:43
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.83230
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/83230