The Impacts of COVID-19 Epidemic on the Daily Work of SIRENE Hungary

Abstract

The coronavirus posed an unprecedented crisis. The importance of assessing the impacts of the pandemic has been continuously increasing worldwide. So far, there have been many estimations and predictions how life, people’s daily routine and their priorities might change after the end of COVID-19 epidemic. In contrast, some publications have already made assessments about the recent past. This paper studies how the operational and strategic assignments, methodologies and work burden of SIRENE Hungary have been altered. The study has a particular focus on how the volume of international criminal information exchange decreased, and the organisation could adapt to the new circumstances successfully. The article concludes, while the harmful effects on wide ranges of law enforcement become a fact, this unexpected situation also opened opportunities and had even positive impacts at several functions. For instance, the decrease of work burden in the international criminal information exchange opened time frames for further development of human resources and their workflow review. This briefly means that the Bureau could deal with pending, time and resource-consuming assignments which usually lead to sluggish procedures under normal circumstances.