Wife beating ok for police officers

[Askold]

Finnish newspaper went through all the disciplinary actions against finnish police officers in the last three years. There were some "interesting" findings.

Like the case that inspired the title for this thread, a certain police officer was sentenced for assaulting his wife, harassing her, trying to run over her with a car etc. He was given a restraint order and because finnish laws and regulations state that "a police officer must, even when off duty, maintain behaviour that will not make citizens lose their trust on the police" the police station obviously had to react to this. They gave him a warning.

Meanwhile another police officer had stolen some 100€ worth stuff from a shop and he was fired and his appeal was rejected. Because we can't have a thief in the police force, that would be just wrong and what would people think? But a wifebeater? Trying to kill your wife? Nothing wrong with that.

And it wasn't just one isolated case, this is a line that is approved by the courts. Another police station tried to fire a police officer after he got a sentence for beating his wife, they justified their case by saying that the police and courts had a campaign against domestic violence and he was assigned to a position where he often in a response team to domestic violence cases. The court decided that this was no reason for him to lose his job. (firing an official is tricky business in Finland.)

There was one police officer who "stole" one car lamp from the stations supplies to put it in his own car and after going to court they decided not to give any punishment since it was such an inconsequential crime, but it still was enough of a justification to fire him.

Compare this to a case where the cop had tried to actually drown his wife and assaulted her with a hammer, one court gave an order for him to lose his job but a higher court rescinded this order after an appeal. He did get a six month time out but now he is back in his job, taking calls from victims of domestic violence...

The newspaper found one case of a wife-beating police officer lost his job. But it was due to an unrelated crime, after beating his wife he went to a thai-massage-parlour and beat a worker there after she refused to fuck him, even for money.


You know, a while ago my trust in finnish police forces was pretty high...

Here's the article but I couldn't find it in english: http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/a1354538735043

[TheUnknown]

Well, at least most of the commenters think that wife-beaters getting of light is bullshit.  At least, that's what I got from the mangled translations I read.

There was only one that seemed to agree with the policy.  Since the translation isn't that good, it sounded like they were arguing that since anything can happen in a family, there could be any number of reasons why a guy would beat his wife, so it's not a good way to judge character, and so it shouldn't be grounds to fire someone.  However, someone who steals will likely keep stealing, so it's safe to judge their character and is enough to get them fired, even though domestic violence is the worse crime.

Is that right?  Because if so, that's a lot of back-bending.

[Askold]

Yeah, I think you got the gist of his/her comment.

I think that commenter somehow considered that whatever happens in the family is "private" and therefore should not matter, or that domestic violence is OK. I wasn't quite sure. They also commented that any "punishment" must come from the court and that society or the workplace are not allowed to fire people as a punishment for their crimes.

Another problem with the finnish police is that any suspected crimes done by the police are investigated by other cops (from a different town) and they rarely "snitch" on each other and in most cases the investigations won't even start because "there is no reason to suspect X." I think we should have some sort of "internal affairs" organisation inside the police just to investigate these things. It would mean rivalry inside the police but since all this camaraderie seems mean that crimes and corruption are ignored I think that would be lesser evil.