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POLICE

Cop faces sack over ‘offensive and disrespectful’ blog

Police in southern Sweden have recommended the firing of a police sergeant who blogged about throwing stones at a thief and secretly dabbing the tip of his sex organ on car door handles.

Cop faces sack over 'offensive and disrespectful' blog

The sergeant was recalled from service with United Nations police forces in Sudan after finding he had maintained a blog under the pseudonym Farbror Blå (Uncle Blue).

Reacting to media revelations about the blog, police in the Skåne region launched an internal investigation and quickly discovered the identity of the mystery scribe, whose open-hearted exposé of life in the force was not appreciated by his superiors.

In its request for Uncle Blue to be removed from the force, the county police chief wrote to the police disciplinary committee that the sergeant’s blog “gives readers the impression that strongly sexist jokes and the offensive and disrespectful treatment of both co-workers and the general public are common occurrences among on duty police officers.”

The Skåne Police Authority also rejected as irrelevant Uncle Blue’s assertion in a letter to the force that the stories detailed on his blog were largely fictionalized versions of police tales heard on the grapevine.

“Regardless of whether the stories are personal experiences, retellings or made up, the Authority is of the view the stories have caused disgust and many people have taken offence.”

Officials cited three blog posts it considered particularly egregious.

In one case, the sergeant and his colleagues arrived at the scene of a possible suicide attempt. As fire rescue workers pleaded with the man to come down from the roof, the officers recognized him as “a bloody thief”.

“We threw stones at him and shouted: ‘Jump, you cowardly bastard!!!'”

The sergeant also claimed that he and a cop buddy had secretly marked a car driven by female co-workers.

“[We] bell-ended* the door handles, window buttons, gear stick, steering wheel, stereo buttons and the police radio buttons, as well as the receiver used to talk to the operations room”.

The practice of bell-ending, or ollning, involves a man touching an object with his glans and has established itself as a recurring form of practical joke in Sweden. The term comes from ollon, the Swedish word for glans.

“When the girls had driven around for an hour or so in the bell-ended police car we had a chat with them and revealed our bell-ending exploits.”

“Now we know what a facial expression of bleak anxiety looks like,” he wrote, ending his post with a smiley face.

In the third post, Uncle Blue told of how he shook hands with a man who had just hanged himself, provoking guffaws from his colleagues.

The sergeant has been placed on desk duty at the Skåne police department’s fraud unit as officials await a response from the disciplinary committee.

*Translation note: Bell-ending, a neologism derived from a slang term for the glans, is not a word in common English-language usage.

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POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

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