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Recently experts and practitioners alike noted the emergence of security challenges arising from radicalisation, often leading to extreme violence. Radicalisation and violent extremism present a security threat also to Mid Europe and Western Balkans countries. In the past few decades, the Western Balkan countries have been viewed as a breeding ground for religious radicals and violent extremism. Nowadays, the police have assumed a crucial role in facilitating a preventive multi-stakeholder approach at the local or regional level, particularly in at risk local settings. The paper presents findings of a study conducted on a sample of 117 students of the Croatian Police College of the Ministry of the Interior and 57 Slovenian police officers. A questionnaire was used to identify police officers' opinion on extent of different forms of extremism/radicalization existing in their countries in general and their opinion on religious extremism/radicalisation in Slovenia and Croatia.

This paper explores the respondents’ views of the police in Croatia and the USA. In 2017, we surveyed a sample of the Croatian emigrants residing in the United States and invited them to fill out a questionnaire containing six hypothetical vignettes describing examples of police corruption. The respondents were asked to evaluate the seriousness of police corruption and estimate how serious police officers in both countries would evaluate these same behaviors. The results show that, in the majority of the scenarios, the respondents evaluated examples of police corruption more seriously in the United States than in Croatia. Similarly, the findings suggest that the respondents perceived that the Croatian police officers would evaluate police corruption less seriously than their U.S. counterparts. Their migrant status was not related to their perceptions of police officers’ evaluations of seriousness.