Safe City Tour: Tackling Root Causes in Helsinki

Categories: City stories
Udgivet: 15 Feb - 2021

The Safe City Tour travels to Helsinki

Reducing social segregation, developing safe and diverse urban areas, maintaining community involvement, proactively reaching families and youth, and addressing root causes to prevent extremism in Helsinki. 

 

The seventh week of the ‘Safe City Tour’ travelled to the Finnish capital city of Helsinki. During the safe city tour week, Helsinki invited the local and global public on a virtual visit, where the the city of Helsinki and the police department provided insights into their approach to improve resident’s general safety, how they work with youth and families, reduce segregation through social mixing and use multiagency collaboration and ongoing dialogue to prevent violent extremism.

 

 

Images: The City of Helsinki

Within the Nordic Safe Cities Alliance, Helsinki‘s ‘Safe City Action‘ focuses on streamlining the process for Helsinki city responds to. extremism and ensure a shared understanding and course of action for civil servants across the public sector in the city.

More broadly, the City of Helsinki has a holistic approach to PVE and safety. The key elements are to foster trust and increase citizen participation to create a more cohesive society. The city works on its own targeted initiatives aimed at general prevention and relies on strong multi-agency cooperation as part of its safety and security work. In PVE-related work Helsinki cooperates widely both with other authorities such as the police, and with civil society.

On the first stop of the Safe City Tour, the Preventive Policing Unit at the Helsinki Police Department provided insights into how use preventive work to improve residents’ safety and to reduce crime in the city. Superintendent Jari Taponen explained that the departments activities are divided into three section:

One section focuses on communities and individuals at risk of exclusion as well as residential areas suffering from segregation on some level; the second section concentrates on people and communities that show signs of political or ideological extremism; the third section focuses on juvenile delinquents and their families and, through multi-professional cooperation, aims to find the reasons of why young people commit crimes.

The aim of the Preventive Policing Unit is to improve the safety of Helsinki residents and to reduce crime. They seek to achieve a Helsinki where everyone can participate in society and not be excluded, and to cease the emergence of parallel societies.

 

Video: Preventive Policing Unit, Helsinki Police Department

 

‘Cooperation is at the heart of all our activities, and we have invested especially in networks’, explained Niina Snö, chief of Safety and Preparedness Unit, City of Helsinki.

Helsinki prioritises maintaining close regular communication with local communities and getting them involved in safety work. The city’s various services and actors are located in different parts of Helsinki and the city organises low-threshold regional events and theme nights for residents to connect with city workers.

Helsinki believes that the best way to strengthen the feeling of safety among local communities is to ensure that they can trust that the city does its best to promote safety. That means that the city guarantees basic public services for everyone and maintains a safe urban environment, where parks are lit at night and streets are kept clean and free of litter.

 

Video: Safety and Preparedness Unit, City of Helsinki.

 

Cooperation is also at the core Helsinki’s outreach youth work. Youth outreach workers meet daily with the police, shopping centre security personnel, child protection professionals and others working with children and young people. The aim of the outreach youth work is to bring safe adults into the children and young people’s leisure time, in situations where there may not be any other adults.

“My trust in the future is strong and vision for the future is positive. Young people act relatively well nowadays, look after one another and are prepared to talk to adults in difficult situations as well. As long as the adults are known to them and safe. Thus, I challenge every one of us to actively approach young people to ask them daily how they are, if everything is ok, how their day has been. That means that young people will have the courage to bring up issues with adults and to ask for help when necessary”, explained Timo Kontio, Executive Director, Outreach Youth Work, City of Helsinki.

 

Video: Outreach Youth Work, City of Helsinki.

 

Katja Nissinen, chief inspector, Helsinki Police Department, further adds that the main advantage of multi-professional work is that solving problems alone is very challenging. But when different actors get together, young people do not need to go from one place to the next to fix their problems – everyone can think about them together. This also allows the city and the police to exchange cases on the fly.

The majority of young people are feeling and behaving well in Helsinki. But the pandemic has brought challenges at school and with learning, finding employment, substance abuse. The problems are diverse, and the power of cooperating closely across sectors in the city is that issues are always handled in the forum that is best suited to dealing with and solving that particular problem. The police see dialogue as their strongest tools for working with youth and their families to get to the root causes of their problems and solve them together.

 

Video: Preventive Policing Unit, Helsinki Police Department

 

In Helsinki, prevention works is also largely focused on creating safe and diverse urban areas. Helsinki understood the dangers of detrimental segregation in residential areas early on and has been successfully implementing social mixing in its housing policy for over 50 years. Diversity, dialogue and well-planned structures are the foundation for a safe Helsinki.

The trademark of a successful residential area is diversity. Diversity of people and diversity of homes. Every area in Helsinki should accommodate people in different stages of their lives and meet different needs, explains Mari Randell, Housing programme manager, City of Helsinki.

The experience of safety is one of the key characteristics of a good area. Helsinki believes that developing active urban spaces that feel inclusive to many different groups of people, strengthens community cohesion and reduces unpleasant or destructive behavior and adds more eyes on the streets.

 

Video: City of Helsinki

 

In Helsinki, coopereation runs through all of the city’s efforts. This includes the prevention of violent extremism (PVE), which is a close operation between police, social services, mental health professions and civil society organisations. Extremism in Finland can be found in all groups that in one way or another are dissatisfied with society. The police in Helsinki therefore prioritise talking to the local people about their worries, fears and what is bothering them, to better understand them and try to solve issues before they turn potentially violent.

 

Video: Helsinki Police Department

“The prevention of extremism is, at its best, very concrete work. The aim is to find new paths together with the person gravitating towards extremism to help them understand how society functions and what the mechanisms are for changing it, as well as to enable them to accept the idea that violence is not the way to change society; we have other systems for that”, explains Jarmo Heinonen, police chief, Helsinki Police Department.

Follow the Safe City Tour as it continues to Stavanger, Norway, February 22 – 26,  on the Nordic Safe Cities Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.