Published 2024-02-08 19.18
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full screen chevron-rightnext Felipe Estrada Dörner, professor of criminology at the Department of Criminology at Stockholm University.
1 / 2Photo: Rickard Kilström/Stockholm University
The police already have such great powers that the government’s proposal for visitation zones is a blow to the air, believes criminologist Felipe Estrada Dörner.
– I don’t feel sorry for some guys in Gucci caps, but it will have a negative effect on crime prevention work.
The government wants the police to be able to establish temporary visitation zones in areas with a high risk of serious gang violence. There, people must be searched without suspicion of crime, for example based on clothing or behavior.
Like heavy referral bodies, Felipe Estrada Dörner, professor of criminology at Stockholm University, questions the need. Swedish police, unlike Danish police, to whom it is often compared in the debate, already have the opportunity to search anyone they think may be involved in gang violence, he says.
– In cases where the police need to stop young people who they believe are carrying weapons, they do so. If they don’t, it’s very bad police work.
No difference
Camila Salazar Atías, criminologist at Fryshuset in Stockholm, meets young people who are often stopped.
– When we talked to young people in our most vulnerable areas where there were a lot of conflicts with gangs, they said “what will be the difference?”, she says.
– It has been free forward, however, has been their feeling. “We get stopped three times a week, on the way to school or something”. Then the police refer to the sections that already exist.
Felipe Estrada Dörner has researched how Swedish police stop and check people suspected of drug use. He has been able to show that certain groups are more often forced to submit urine and blood tests even though they have not used drugs.
– These are groups that tend to live in the poorer areas, have less resources when they grew up and have a foreign background, which is also a result you recognize from international research.
More are stopped
If the thresholds are systematically lowered through visitation zones, everything points to the fact that more innocent people will be stopped, he says.
– And it will not be randomly distributed, but it will be systematically skewed towards certain groups.
It is harmful because research shows that people’s trust in the police is crucial to being able to effectively counter serious violence in vulnerable areas, according to Felipe Estrada Dörner.
– This simply puts that piece of the puzzle at risk.
Camila Salazar Atías often meets police officers who are aware that incorrect searches take place and that it would be harmful to abuse the search zones.
– If you feel that we all live in an area where we are made suspicious, then of course it will go completely wrong.
