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GANG

Cops quiz 11-year-old over gang attacks

An 11-year-old boy has been brought in by police in connection with a series of knife point robberies in Malmö. Victims were unaccompanied women, and police believe that a gang of boys aged between 11 and 13 are responsible for the attacks.

”The gang has been hanging around the area, sending out one or two boys at a time to rob the victims. The knife, or knives, have been shared around among the boys,” said Glenn Sjögren of the Malmö police youth department.

The attacks have all taken place in or around Folkets Park in Malmö.

In the latest incident on Thursday evening, two women, aged 26 and 31, were attacked within minutes of one another. Both succeeded in scaring away the young offenders before they managed to steal anything.

On Sunday evening two female victims in their twenties were also attacked at knife point by two boys.

One of the women received a minor cut to her hand when trying to protect herself against the thieves. The boys managed to take a small sum of money from her.

The knife that has been used in the attacks has been described by the victims as a bread knife or barbecue knife.

Police apprehended the young suspect from his school.

“We hope that the 11-year old, who is not the youngest, will tell us who the others are,” said the police to TT .

The boy will be heard in the youth department of the police family violence department which is situated separate from the Malmö police buildings.

“This is a tactical decision,” said Sjögren to TT.

“It is important not raise the boy’s status.”

The boy is not old enough to be criminally responsible, and will not be formally under suspicion for a crime. He can be legally interrogated for a maximum of three hours. After this, the case will be handed over to social services.

The interview will be conducted in the presence of the boy’s parents and a social secretary.

“The fact that the boy is 11 is very unusual,” Camilla Martinsson, one of the four social secretaries from the youth department in Malmö, told TT.

Martinsson explained that the child’s social circumstances and the potential need for treatment is what will be considered. Any measures taken will reflect the child’s situation, not the severity of the crime.

“You have to try to do things so it works out as best as possible for the child.”

The first step of the process is always to talk to a child and its parents, but sometimes children are forced to be detained in Sweden’s youth welfare system.

”You try to avoid taking a child into care unless absolutely necessary. It’s only a last resort,” said Martinsson to TT.

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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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