RIGAS PASVALDIBAS POLICIJA

Their core work

Riga Municipal Police is the public law enforcement agency responsible for maintaining order, safety, and crime prevention across Latvia's capital city. In EU-funded research, they participate as an operational practitioner — bringing front-line policing experience that pure academic institutions cannot replicate. Their contribution to consortia is grounded in real-world knowledge of urban crime patterns, community-police relations, and the practical constraints of rolling out prevention programs in a major Eastern European city. They function as a field validation site and operational end-user, testing research outputs against the realities of daily policing.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their first project, IcARUS, covered a broad sweep of urban security concerns — juvenile delinquency, trafficking, public space management, and cross-border crime — suggesting an entry point as a generalist urban safety practitioner. By their second project, INDEED, the focus had narrowed sharply to radicalization, violent extremism, and de-radicalization specifically, with an emphasis on evaluation and evidence-based methods. The trajectory is a clear move from broad urban safety toward counter-terrorism and CVE work, likely reflecting both shifts in EU funding priorities and the organization's own developing interest in this domain.

Riga Municipal Police is deepening its engagement with radicalization prevention and evidence-based policing, making them a strong candidate for future consortia focused on CVE, de-radicalization program assessment, or community-police trust-building in urban Eastern European contexts.

How they like to work

Riga Municipal Police has participated exclusively as a consortium partner across both projects, never taking the coordinator role — consistent with a public authority that contributes operational knowledge rather than driving research design. Their two projects together brought in 35 unique partners across 16 countries, pointing to large pan-European consortia where their role is to provide a Baltic law enforcement validation site. For a future partner, this means they are reliable practitioners who can anchor research in real-world policing contexts, but should not be expected to take project management or coordination responsibility.

Despite only two projects, they have connected with 35 unique partners across 16 countries — a sign of participation in large, multi-stakeholder European security research consortia. Their network likely spans security agencies, criminology research institutes, NGOs, and municipal authorities across the EU.

What sets them apart

As the operational police force of Riga — Latvia's capital and a major Eastern European city at the EU's eastern border — they offer a perspective that Western-European-dominated security consortia often lack: Baltic and post-Soviet urban policing realities, cross-border crime exposure, and minority community dynamics specific to the region. This makes them a high-value partner for projects that need geographic and institutional diversity, particularly those requiring real-world pilot sites in new EU member states. Their status as a public authority also lends legitimacy and direct policy-implementation pathways that academic partners cannot provide.

Highlights from their portfolio

• IcARUS
  Their entry project and the larger of the two by funding (EUR 30,875), covering the widest thematic scope including trafficking, juvenile delinquency, and public space — establishing Riga Municipal Police as a broad urban security practitioner in the EU research ecosystem.
• INDEED
  Most thematically focused project, directly addressing radicalization and violent extremism prevention with an evidence-based evaluation lens — the clearest signal of their emerging specialization in CVE work.