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KIDNAPPING

Search continues for 4-year-old Maryam

Despite a massive search, a four-year-old girl who disappeared on New Year's Eve in Malmö in southern Sweden is still missing. Her mother claims she was kidnapped by two men and was being taken to her father, who lives abroad.

Published: 2 January 2010 10:04 CET

Police have released the girl’s name, Maryam Ali Abdulhadi, and photo and asked the public for assistance, reported the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

The four-year-old Maryam, who was wearing pink and sporting pigtails, was with her aunts at Gustav Adolf square in central Malmö when she disappeared just after midnight. They called the police after unsuccessfully searching for her in the crowd for 30 minutes.

The girl’s mother has said that her daughter has been kidnapped and is on her way to her father, reported Norwegian newspaper VG, which interviewed the mother yesterday evning.

The mother told VG that Maryam’s father has called her and told her what had occurred. He explained that the girl was okay, but she was going to live with him.

The mother added that she doesn’t know the child’s current location. She told VG that the kidnapping was done by two men.

Swedish police have declined to comment on the new information, according to VG.

Several police officers searched for the girl in central Malmö on New Year’s Day. They interviewed several family members, but there is still no information about where Maryam might be.

Police began with a preliminary investigation of human trafficking, since “there were circumstances” that indicated that someone had taken the girl.

“But we are not focusing on a particular individual,” Bo Paulsson, commander on duty at the Malmö police, told TT news agency last night.

The girl and both of her parents are foreign citizens. The girl lives with her mother in Sweden while her father resides abroad.

Police did not actively search for the girl Friday night and Saturday morning.

“But all police patrols know about this and are keeping their eyes and ears open,” Paulsson said.

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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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