Preventive activities play an important role in police activities in order to prevent problems from occurring and/or reduce their negative effects. With limited resources, it is important that prevention activities are targeted and effective and that they deal with important and correct problems and target groups. However, the Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) lacked knowledge of the best evidence-based practices and needed to investigate which prevention activities are effective and which should be abandoned due to their ineffectiveness.

The purpose of the study was to compare PPA prevention interventions with interventions from Great Britain that have undergone impact assessment. Praxis mapped PPA’s preventive activities; analyzed the Crime Reduction Toolkit (CRT), an overview of evidence-based effective prevention activities prepared for the British police, as well as with the scientific literature used to compile the overview. Based on the result of our study, PPA will validate its current prevention portfolio and create rules for the selection of effective prevention interventions.

The study revealed, for example, that a number of preventive activities are carried out in the PPA, which have not been reflected in the CRT. Among the topics that are not the focus of this analysis, PPA also deals with border guarding and water safety, citizenship, migration, and corruption issues. Separately, the coordinators of prevention services pointed out cybercrime as an important focus area, as well as, for example, radicalization and sexual abuse. In addition, in the subject areas covered in the CRT (traffic, drugs, etc.), there were also activities that are carried out in Estonia but have not been evaluated in the CRT or that have not been mentioned in the previous comparison of the activities of the CRT and PPA. Several of these activities are aimed at schools or teachers and focus on advising them on various topics (traffic, drug prevention, coping with crisis situations).