HS Interview: Tapio Mäkinen May Know More About Police Crime Suspects Than Anyone
Translated from Finnish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.
At a glance
Interview
Named sources
Under investigation
- Tapio Mäkinen, who leads Finland’s national police crime unit, says the country’s police have very high morale overall.
- He acknowledges that some officers should not be in the profession and that colleagues occasionally protect police suspects, although this is less common than in the past.
- Mäkinen says individual cases should not be used to stigmatize the entire police force.
Some police officers encountered in criminal investigations should never have become police officers, says Tapio Mäkinen, the state prosecutor who leads Finland’s national police crime unit. But he argues that their conduct should not discredit the profession as a whole.
Mäkinen has decades of experience and may have a broader view of criminal suspicions involving Finnish police than almost anyone else in the country. As head of the unit at the Office of the Prosecutor General, he handles reports concerning police officers’ official duties.
He says officers sometimes protect colleagues suspected of crimes, although this happens less often than it did in previous years. At the same time, Mäkinen considers the overall moral standards of Finland’s police to be very high.
About this summary
Originally published by Helsingin Sanomat in Finnish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.
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