Crime Trends in Borderlands: Similarities and Differences Across Nordic Border Regions
Talk by Professor Peter Lindström, Linnaeus University. Part of CCC Lunch Seminars.
The five Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland) share a long-standing tradition of cooperation in criminal justice policy in general and policing in particular. Cross-national comparative analyses of criminal justice statistics, including police-recorded offences, are well established within Nordic criminological research. However, comparative studies of crime trends across major Nordic cities have been less common, while research focusing specifically on border areas remains largely absent, both in Nordic scholarship and in the broader international literature. In addition, previous research has made limited use of advanced statistical measures to assess similarities and differences in crime trends over time.
The aim of this article is to analyse trends in police-recorded crime across three levels of analysis: (i) the national level, (ii) the city level, and (iii) borderlands. Particular attention is given to three distinct border regions: the urban Øresund region, encompassing the cities of Malmö and Copenhagen; the Tornio Valley, including the medium-sized twin towns of Haparanda and Tornio on either side of the Swedish–Finnish border; and rural municipalities along the Swedish–Norwegian border, where a joint police station was inaugurated in 2025. These border regions are currently included in an ongoing research project on police cooperation in borderlands.
The study combines graphical visualisations with distance measures generated through Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithms and additional statistical measures to assess similarities and differences in crime trends over time. Preliminary findings indicate that crime trends within borderlands are more similar to one another than those observed among major cities or at the national level. The results suggest that enhanced cross-border police cooperation – including intelligence sharing on volume crime, joint police patrols and operations, and joint investigation teams – may play an increasingly important role in future borderland policing and crime prevention.