Nordic police cooperation – from policy to reality

Cooperation between police in the Nordic countries is nothing new. It has been going on for a long time. What is new is the ever closer cooperation between four of the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – aimed at improving coordination. 

“We have different pieces of the jigsaw. Now, we can put these together and become more efficient when fighting cross-border crime,” Jonas Wendel tells the Nordic Labour Journal. 

He is a police superintendent and head of the Swedish local police district of Arvika, comprising four municipalities including Eda which borders on Norway in the west. 

“The house is there. Built exactly on the border between Norway and Sweden so that half of it is in Eidskog municipality in Norway and the other half is in Eda municipality. This will be a unique police station and I don’t think there is anything like it anywhere else in the world,” he says. 

Crime worth billions

But before we move on, let us take a look at one example of how many billions of kronor are being created through crime. In its report “The Criminal Economy” published in September 2024, Swedish police write:

“The criminal economy in Sweden is estimated to be generating between 100 and 150 billion kronor (€8.9bn to €13.3bn) annually. This is nearly four times the police authority’s entire budget for 2024.”

Common ground and challenges

Back to the new police station and its positioning. It deviates from current regulations. Building a house on a national border is not allowed. There must also be a certain buffer zone to the border, explains Jonas Wendel. 

“In this instance, an exception was made through a border agreement between both countries to make this police station a reality.”

There were also a range of regulations to consider before construction could start. Like the fact that Swedish soil must not leave Swedish territory and the same applies to Norwegian soil.

“So it was important that any soil that was dug up to be removed ended up in the right country,” says Jonas Wendel.

Other issues to be solved included which construction norms would be applied to the building – was it possible to follow different ones and meet in the middle? Would there be a shared sewage system, who would be responsible for waste disposal and could Norwegian cleaners work on the Swedish side and vice versa? 

“The solution was that a Norwegian company built the house and the Swedish government signed a 25-year lease agreement,” says the police superintendent.

The inauguration will take place in May this year, and according to Jonas Wendel, things are on schedule. The alarm system has been installed, and work is now underway to implement the access control system and the like, he explains. The floors and ceilings will be clearly marked to show where the national border runs.

“You need that in order to know exactly which country you are in. The reason is that Swedish police can only operate on Swedish territory and the same goes for Norwegian police.”

A cooperation hub 

The new police station will house police officers from both countries. They will patrol and carry out intelligence operations.

Sweden already has a number of community police officers in place who work with Norwegian police. They are ready to move into the new police station. The community police officers primarily work in external operational service.

“Norway has had a police station on the Norwegian border for some time. We have worked with them to develop shared tactics and a legal framework allowing us to become well-coordinated.

"When we move into the same building, we have already made significant progress,” says Jonas Wendel, whose ambition is to strengthen the team with additional police officers this year.

The station will also cooperate closely with the Norwegian and Swedish customs authorities. The police work largely in the same area as customs, like cross-border crime, explains Jonas Wendel. He sees clear benefits from co-location.

“It is important to sit together in the same building and be able to talk to each other even if it will be fairly complicated because of all the regulations,” he says.

Preventing legal border obstacles 

Even though a lot of legislation governing police work is shared in the Nordic countries, there are areas where they differ. These are the areas that can create problems for cross-border regional police cooperation. 

Nordic justice ministers focused on this challenge when they met in September 2024 to agree on a new cooperation programme for the Nordic Council of Ministers’ justice sector 2024 – 2030 with focus on:

• promoting Nordic legal unity
• the rule of law in the Nordic region
• prevention and combatting crime and terrorism

The programme lists two sub-priorities when it comes to promoting Nordic legal unity:

1. Contribute to preventing and combating cross-border obstacles in the Nordic region that arise due to legislative conditions.
2. Ensure that the Nordic countries, when preparing legislation, share and gather information about existing legislation in the other countries.

Armed or not armed

One issue which has had a lot of attention in this context is that Norwegian police are unarmed while Swedish police are always armed. 

“This is a very difficult issue and a considerable spanner in the works. That’s why the Norwegian and Swedish ministries of justice are now working on a bilateral agreement that I hope will grant us expanded powers on each other’s territory,” says Jonas Wendel.

He has contributed to the agreement and wants to see Swedish police patrols being able to respond to alarms in Norway, as well as joint patrolling with both Norwegian and Swedish officers in the same vehicle. 

Since 2008, EU member states have been able to improve cross-border cooperation in accordance with the so-called Prüm decision. This was used when Malmö hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, which was manned by both Danish and Norwegian police, and when Norway heightened its terror threat level and got help from Swedish police. 

Decisions on operations based on the Prüm decision must always be made in advance, which complicates daily cross-border police cooperation.

“The border should not be a legal obstacle. We in the Swedish police should be able to travel into Norway as part of our daily work without needing prior approval for Prüm operations. This is not practical when urgent action is required,” he says and adds that Norway has just got a new Minister of Justice and that the changes he hopes for are a delicate matter which could take time. 

Danish police in Swedish operations centre

Another example of Nordic police cooperation can be found in Malmö in Southern Sweden. This is Sweden’s only regional operations centre – of which there are seven – that is manned by police from two countries.

Stefan Sintéus, a chief of police with long international experience, leads the work. He tells the Nordic Labour Journal: 

“The Nordic police cooperation has two levels. One is the legal level, where police submit a request for legal assistance to a prosecutor to initiate an investigation. The other is a practical level where cooperation takes place across the border. 

“In our case, at the operations centre, we handle intelligence from both Sweden and Denmark that does not require legal assistance." 

The latter type of cooperation is about information sharing and is based on a cooperation agreement between the two Nordic countries.

“Our cooperation works well and there are no language issues since we make an effort to speak clearly. If something happens that requires action, we have rules for how this should happen. 

“If we travel to Denmark, we first contact their information centre so that Danish and Swedish police can work together and the other way around.”

Earlier, Danish and Swedish police had so-called joint patrolling, which meant they could be in the same police vehicle on patrol.

“This could only happen in areas near the bridgeheads on the Danish and Swedish sides and as a result it was quite limited.

"Today, we have technological solutions that were not available back then, like speed cameras, stops at the Öresund Bridge toll station and the customs’ automatic numberplate recognition,” says Stefan Sintéus.

The Malmö operations centre was set up when the need for more cooperation became evident after the many shootings in the city in 2019. Malmö police were given extra resources when the police authorities declared a “National special event against serious violence in the country”.

The project was named Rimfrost and was led by Stefan Sintéus. Its main objective was to reduce the number of shootings and explosions in criminal environments.

“Rimfrost taught us that we have to coordinate information and work together much more and not be isolated in silos. So we set up a regional operations centre in Region Syd to be able to coordinate and streamline information,” he says.

There is now also a national operations centre in Stockholm, at the police headquarters in Kungsholmen, where police from Denmark, Finland and Norway share office space with at least one other Nordic country.

Increased information exchange is one of the points that Petra Lundh, Sweden’s national police commissioner, highlights in the new operational management model which she presented in December 2024:

“We will improve efficiency by replacing the current process management with a new leadership model, where the policing problem takes centre stage and information is shared to a greater extent.”

This is welcomed by Stefan Sintéus.

No more stations on a national border

According to Swedish police, there are currently no further plans for building another police station near or on the Finnish-Swedish border. However, Sweden did enter into a bilateral agreement with Finland to strengthen police cooperation in Tornedalen on 1 February 2025. The agreement will be implemented at a later stage, the police wrote to the Nordic Labour Journal.

In the case of Denmark and Sweden, geography presents challenges. The countries are divided by water and there are no buildings on the Öresund bridge.

Danish-Swedish research project

The academic community is also showing interest in Nordic police cooperation. Researchers from Sweden and Denmark are working together in a project called "Policing and crime prevention cooperation in border areas". 

The aim is “to describe and analyse everyday police work and crime prevention cooperation in border areas on structural and everyday levels, based on quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods.”

Peter Lindström, professor of criminology at the Linnæus University, heads the project.

“Cooperation on paper is not the same as cooperation in real life. This sometimes stops on a policy level and does not reach all the way down to operational activities. That is something we want to examine.”

The research group comprise criminologist Johan Rosquist from the Linnæus University; May-Britt Rinaldo Ronnebro, a former police officer with a degree in criminology from the University of Cambridge and a former expert from the Linnæus University; Ulf Sempert, former police commissioner and now a consultant; as well as Henrik Stevnsborg, historian and professor emeritus at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen, who previously has studied the cooperation between Nordic government ministers and police commissioners.

“We have a good group of researchers and our work is interdisciplinarily. In the group we have expertise in law, sociology, political science and policing, in addition to criminology,” says Peter Lindström.

The research group will examine the differences and similarities in Nordic police work to identify what can be learned from each other. A preliminary study has been done and the project is expected to be completed by 2028.