Ottavainen elected Police of the Year

Detective Senior Sergeant Risto Ottavainen of the Oulu Police Department has been voted Police Officer of the Year 2017, said an official press release.

Ottavainen works as a team leader in immigration investigations in Oulu.

The grounds for choosing the Police Officer of the Year state that Ottavainen's key virtues include treating clients as equals and his confidence-building behaviour.

The grounds state that “Ottavainen's positive attitude to cooperation and encounters with immigrants has lowered the threshold for clients contacting and engaging in dialogue with the police about issues of all kinds.”

Ottavainen emphasised the importance of immigrants learning to trust the Finnish police, since the situation in their home countries can be quite different.

“In Oulu, trust has become so strong that, among other things, Somalis have invited immigration police officers into their own mosque to discuss matters of concern to them,” Ottavainen said.

Ottavainen is convinced that such activities have a positive impact on the integration of immigrants in Finnish society.

“You have to move among them and be active and honest about both positive and negative issues, without creating a misleading picture,” he added.

Risto Ottavainen is an experienced and skilled police officer. He has spent 21 years in various tasks with the police.

Ottavainen became a police officer in the Oulu Police Department in 1996, as a field officer in the uniformed patrol police, but he soon became an investigator in what was then the criminal investigation bureau (rikostoimisto), from which he moved to the violent crime investigation unit (väkivaltatutkinta).

He was transferred to the immigration investigation unit of the Oulu Police Department in 2008, where he initially worked as an investigator and then as head of the Investigation Team.