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MISSING

Missing Malmö woman found unharmed

Jenny Persson, a 30-year-old woman who was reported missing on August 2nd, was found in good health Sunday afternoon in Lomma, 10 kilometres north of Malmö in southern Sweden.

Missing Malmö woman found unharmed

“A man called in and told us that someone who looked a lot like Jenny was sitting near a playground,” said press officer Lars-Håkan Lindholm from the Malmö police to The Local.

The man had spotted a woman who he thought looked very much like the missing Jenny across the street from his house.

According to a report in local paper Kvällsposten, the man recognised the outfit she was wearing from the descriptions in the papers and reacted to the fact that her legs looked badly sunburnt, as if she was in pain.

The man watched her as she walked about a hundred metres to a bench near a playground and sat down.

“I asked her if she was alright and she said she was,” the man told Kvällsposten.

He also asked if she was the missing Jenny from the papers, which she denied.

Not convinced, the man decided to phone authorities, telling the police that the woman as acting a bit “confused”.

A couple of police patrols were sent to the location identified by the caller and subsequently found Jenny.

“She was exhausted, but unharmed. One of the patrol cars drove her to the university hospital in Malmö where doctors looked after her,” Persson told the TT news agency.

When she was interviewed briefly by police, Jenny didn’t divulge any information to indicate she had been held against her will or subject to any other crimes.

“She his since given an account of her whereabouts for the last week and as far as we are concerned the case is closed,” said Lindholm to The Local.

Nor were police unable to extract any details about where she had been since she was last seen by her boyfriend on the morning of August 1st.

According to her boyfriend, Jenny left the couple’s shared flat in central Malmö around 9am, telling him that she was going “to work”. 

But apart from the boyfriend, no one else had seen Jenny since May, according to the local police, with the only contact coming via text messages. 

In addition, police later learned that Jenny had lied about claims to have been working at a Malmö hospital, as she had not been on the job since August of last year.

Despite many unanswered questions about her whereabouts in recent weeks, Jenny’s family was relieved to learn she had been found.

“We’re overjoyed, and we’ve received so much support,” her mother, Anita Persson, told the Kvällsposten newspaper.

“We just hug her. Everything’s forgotten. We’ll start from scratch and will try to help her,” she told the paper.

The family were reunited with Jenny in the hospital. The first one on the scene was her boyfriend, who never had given up hope that she was safe.

“I told her that I thank God and everyone that she is alive,” he told daily Aftonbladet.

The police don’t want to disclose any information regarding Jenny’s whereabouts but leave it to her and the family to go public with any details regarding the case.

“There were no peculiarities with the account she gave us,” said Lindholm to The Local.

At the same time, it doesn’t happen often that someone gone for as long as Jenny has been missing turn up safe.

“Especially not when there’s been so much media attention,” Lindholm told The Local.

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SHOOTINGS

US criminologist lauds Malmö for anti-gang success

The US criminologist behind the anti-gang strategy designed to reduce the number of shootings and explosions in Malmö has credited the city and its police for the "utterly pragmatic, very professional, very focused" way they have put his ideas into practice.

US criminologist lauds Malmö for anti-gang success
Johan Nilsson/TT

In an online seminar with Malmö mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, David Kennedy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said implementing his Group Violence Intervention (GVI) strategy had gone extremely smoothly in the city.

“What really stands out about the Malmö experience is contrary to most of the places we work,” he said. “They made their own assessment of their situation on the ground, they looked at the intervention logic, they decided it made sense, and then, in a very rapid, focused and business-like fashion, they figured out how to do the work.”

He said that this contrasted with police and other authorities in most cities who attempt to implement the strategy, who tend to end up “dragging their feet”, “having huge amounts of political infighting”, and coming up with reasons why their city is too different from other cities where the strategy has been a success.

Malmö’s Sluta Skjut (Stop Shooting) pilot scheme was extended to a three-year programme this January, after its launch in 2018 coincided with a reduction in the number of shootings and explosions in the city.

“We think it’s a good medicine for Malmö for breaking the negative trend that we had,” Malmö police chief Stefan Sintéus said, pointing to the fall from 65 shootings in 2017 to 20 in 2020, and in explosions from 62 in 2017 to 17 in 2020.

A graph from Malmö police showing the reduction in the number of shootings from 2017 to 2020. Graph: Malmö Police
A graph from Malmö police showing the reduction in the number of explosions in the city between 2017 and 2020. Graph: Malmö Police

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In their second evaluation of the programme, published last month, Anna-Karin Ivert, Caroline Mellgren, and Karin Svanberg, three criminologists from Malmö University, reported that violent crime had declined significantly since the program came into force, and said that it was possible that the Sluta Skjut program was partly responsible, although it was difficult to judge exactly to what extent. 

The number of shootings had already started to decline before the scheme was launched, and in November 2019, Sweden’s national police launched Operation Rimfrost, a six-month crackdown on gang crime, which saw Malmö police reinforced by officers from across Sweden.

But Kennedy said he had “very little sympathy” for criminologists critical of the police’s decision to launch such a massive operation at the same time as Sluta Skjut, making it near impossible to evaluate the programme.

“Evaluation is there to improve public policy, public policy is not there to provide the basis for for sophisticated evaluation methodology,” he argued.

“When people with jobs to do, feel that they need to do things in the name of public safety, they should follow their professional, legal and moral judgement. Not doing something to save lives, because it’s going to create evaluation issues, I think, is simply privileging social science in a way that it doesn’t deserve.”

US criminologist David Kennedy partaking in the meeting. Photo: Richard Orange

Sluta Skjut has been based around so-called ‘call-ins’, in which known gang members on probation are asked to attend meetings, where law enforcement officials warn them that if shootings and explosions continue, they and the groups around them will be subject to intense focus from police.

At the same time, social workers and other actors in civil society offer help in leaving gang life.

Of the 250-300 young men who have been involved in the project, about 40 have been sent to prison, while 49 have joined Malmö’s ‘defector’ programme, which helps individuals leave gangs.

Kennedy warned not to focus too much on the number of those involved in the scheme who start to work with social services on leaving gang life.

“What we find in in practice is that most of the impact of this approach doesn’t come either because people go to prison or because they take services and leave gang life,” he said.

“Most of the impact comes from people simply putting their guns down and no longer being violent.”

“We think of the options as continuing to be extremely dangerous, or completely turning one’s life around. That’s not realistic in practice. Most of us don’t change that dramatically ever in our lives.”

He stressed the importance of informal social control in his method, reaching those who gang members love and respect, and encouraging them to put pressure on gang members to abstain from gun violence.

“We all care more about our mothers than we care about the police, and it turns out that if you can find the guy that this very high risk, very dangerous person respects – literally, you know, little old ladies will go up to him and get his attention and tell him to behave himself. And he will.”

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