Mid Sweden University

Elite tactical teams in police and military contexts handle high-risk, complex operations that demand psychological resilience. Their selection, training, and operational strategies continuously drive toward optimized work performance. Character strengths, which guide a person’s actions and behaviors, are one likely factor in work performance. This study examines the character strengths prioritized by Swedish Special Intervention Unit officers and compares them with those prioritized by Australian Special Operations Forces applicants, operators, and support troops. Using a ranking methodology, 42 Swedish Special Intervention officers identified the character strengths they felt most represented themselves from 24 options. The findings are compared with four Australian Special Forces groups. The results revealed that ‘Good Judgment,’ followed by ‘Curiosity,’ was the most prominent character strength rated by the Swedish officers. Combining the top four ranks, ‘Teamworker’ emerged as the most frequently ranked character strength, followed by ‘Persistence.’ The comparative analysis with the Australian Special Operation Forces highlighted significant similarities, suggesting that some character strengths, such as ‘Teamworker,’ may be essential across tactical units. 

This article presents an ongoing study on AI-supported micro-exercises for crisis management training. The research is conducted across three municipalities and incorporates insights from educational contexts. It involves parallel tabletop exercises simulating Emergency OperationsCentres (EOC). Audio recordings from these exercises were transcribed using OpenAI Whisper and analyzed with AI tools such as ChatGPT. The AI-generated transcripts facilitated comparisons of the groups' working methods and enabled reflective organizational learning.

Preliminary findings indicate the potential of AI to offer a scalable, data-driven exercise format that supports documentation, analysis, and after-action review. Our study advocates the advantages of flexible and repeatable micro-exercises and underscoresthe importance of ethical considerations when employing AI in crisis training.

Vehicle stops represent one of the most frequent yet tactically complex interactions between law enforcement officers and civilians. Although often routine, they can escalate rapidly. This study investigated the role of situation awareness (SA) in police officers' decision-making during vehicle stops. Drawing on Endsley's three-level SA model and Huhta's seven police-specific SA themes, this study explored how officers perceive, comprehend, and project evolving situations. Using qualitative data from 49 interviews with Swedish police officers, this study identified key elements that influence SA, including time and distance management, partner roles, suspect profiling, environmental conditions, tactical options, ongoing self-assessment, and identification of dangerous objects. These findings highlight the significance of structured training, effective communication, and adaptive tactics to enhance SA. This study contributes to both theoretical frameworks and practical advancements by offering insights to inform evidence-based training and policy development aimed at improving safety for both officers and civilians during vehicle stops.

Denna studie undersöker polisens agerande vid pågående dödligt våld (PDV) för att förstå deras reaktioner, beslutsfattande och agerande under hög stress. Genom observation av polisens PDV-övningar identifieras utmaningar och hinder samt effektiva strategier för att hantera sådana situationer. Resultaten visar att poliserna hade svårigheter med att förstå den komplexa situationen, vilket påverkade deras agerande. De uppvisade varierande grad av situationsförståelse och hade svårt att prioritera mellan olika uppgifter samt utmaningar med att identifiera hot och utföra livräddande åtgärder. Diskussionen belyser behovet av att integrera relevant forskning i polisutbildningen och övningarna för att förbättra polisernas förmåga att hantera PDV.

Active shooter events require swift action. This study examines situation awareness during these incidents, focusing on how officers transition from less confrontational approaches to more confrontational, life-saving tactics. Using qualitative research based on observations from six active shooter training exercises, the study highlights key factors such as information, experience, and shared mental models that influence situation awareness. The findings reveal that while officers are willing to take risks, they often struggle to adopt the necessary speed and dominance needed to neutralize the threat effectively. 

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic documentation have not been widely explored in crisis management, despite their potential utility in facilitating the transcription of speech recordings. Although documentation is widely recognized as essential for creating a common operational picture, there is often a lack of such documentation, which can hinder understanding of events during and after a crisis. The novelty of the research is to apply existing technology and evaluate the potential of ASR technology in the domain of crisis management. We present preliminary results of using OpenAI Whisper for automatic transcription and documentation. In Phase 1, the ASR software was tested with existing recordings from previous research. In Phase 2, data was collected from recorded meetings during a tabletop exercise. The results indicate that transcripts, combined with other AI technologies, can provide valuable information and support for crisis and emergency management in Emergency Operation Centers. 

In this “work in progress” research, we attempt to understand and explore the effects of inadequate documentation during crises. We have studied the work of three different organizations during the first six months of the Covid- 19 pandemic and have been able to ascertain that almost no official documents from the organizations' crisis management teams can be found. The consequences of inadequate documentation resulted in challenges when learning from mistakes, difficulties in real-time learning, and a lack of understanding regarding the rationale behind the decisions made. This institutional amnesia is problematic for many reasons and needs to be further studied. The next step in our research will be to study information culture and try to understand the effect of this amnesia on resilience.

In extreme situations, the police have limited time to react when a threat or a situation arises suddenly. Situation awareness has been identified as a key factor for success in how tactical decisions are made. This helps the police to perform secure and legally correct interventions and decisions. We collected the primary data from 21 interviews with police officers, supplemented by literature and documents. We analyzed the relationship between tactical methods and situation awareness. The purpose of the article is to explore the relationship between police tactics and police officers’ work with situation awareness. Situation awareness has been studied through the lens of the Swedish police general tactical explanation model. We discuss how the general tactical explanation model provides the conditions for the police officers’ explanations to achieve situation awareness. We conclude that if the general tactical explanation model is applied during tactical interventions there are better possibilities to achieve situation awareness.

An active shooter event is one of the most complicated situations a police officer could face. Today the standard procedure for an active shooter event is to enter the scene and try to prevent casualties. This involves taking great risks and puts the police officers in a situation they have not been trained for. This is a work in progress paper where the long-term goal is to develop modern technology that could increase the chance of saving lives and decrease the risk of being injured or killed during an active shooter event. Six active shooter event exercises taking place in Sweden have been studied using an ethnographic field study approach. Four themes have been identified where we argue that technology could enhance the police mission: A) Situational awareness; B) Decision making/prioritization; C) Localization of both sound and people; D) Decreasing time of intervention. 

This is a work in progress paper on work and IT usage in distributed crisis management. The data presented in this paper has been collected at a one-day tabletop exercise with four Swedish municipalities. Four members of the four municipalities’ crisis organizations were invited to the exercise, which was designed as one scenario divided into two cases. At the start of each case of the exercise, each municipality was split into two separate rooms, to simulate a distributed crisis management. During the first case they could communicate using phone, TETRA radio, and the Internet. During case two in the scenario, there was no Internet connection. The study indicates that all the municipalities managed to organize and solve the given tasks using primarily voice communication, in case one using phone or, e.g., Teams, and in case two using TETRA radio. Information sharing using IT was non-existing