Review of the Community Police Officers’ Work at the Zagreb County Police Administration

Sa？etak The aim of this research was to examine the conditions and sentiment of the community police officers at the Zagreb County Police Administration, fifteen years after the Community Strategy have been introduced. The vast majority (93%) of the community police officers in this research stated that they took this job willingly and that the main reason for doing it is working and communicating with citizens (71%). However, it should be noted that 30% of the participants believe that their job expectations have largely failed. As for working on their beats in 2016 and first six months of 2017, police officers gave three days as the most frequent response. During their first year police officers with less than 10 years of service experience as beat officers spent three days working on their beats per week, while police officers with 10 or more years of experience spent five days per week. This difference is statistically significant (t (109) = -5.01, p < 0.001) and points out that at the beginning of the operative and preventive work reform police officers spent more time on their beats than in the past few years. We have also examined the perceived sentiment of other police officers toward community policing and we have found different levels of satisfaction with the different police structures. Despite all the problems they are facing at work, vast majority of community police officers (92%) wants to keep working at their present position, with greater percentage among police officers from Zagreb County than among police officers from Zagreb City