Subscribe
The extraordinary growth of crime in many European countries, owed to uncontrolled mass immigration, has put strains on existing law enforcement and its abilities. Commonly, the political discourse promotes further investments into police, courts, and prisons – and increasingly often, far-reaching legislation that is often criticised for being intrusive and denying the rights of non-criminal citizens.
Sweden is a country where the developments within law enforcement have taken perhaps the most noticeable turn in Europe as of late. As recently as 2015 the country had some of the lowest police densities on the continent. That is, the amount of police officers per inhabitant. Since then, the only acceptable political position has largely been that the police institution must grow, at all costs.
The same also goes for the prisons, which in Sweden have been stuck at a comparatively low capacity despite the dramatic rise in crime throughout the 2010s. While there are few objections to the construction and expansion of punitive institutions, a more recently arisen debate, spearheaded by the nationalist Sweden Democrats, concerns not only the quantity, but also the quality of Swedish prison stays.
Traditionally, Swedish prisons have put more emphasis on rehabilitation than punishment, and prisoners have a wide variety of recognised rights that has led to conditions for dangerous inmates being caring and humane to the point of derision. Today, an inmate costs the Swedish tax payers over 3 000 SEK (just over 300 euros) per day. This has been compared to the costs in other European countries, which even if adjusted for inflation sometimes amounts to just one tenth of the Swedish cost.
Disregarding the issue of excessive prison quality, that prison facilities must expand is, just like with the police expansion, not a partisan issue in Sweden anymore. Even the previous Social Democratic government, a party traditionally known and berated on the right wing for its lax and naïve approach to crime, accepted that it must embrace the new authoritarian outlook sweeping across the country. In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the major parties on both sides were criticised for back-and-forth trying to outbid their opponents with how many tax billions they were willing to spend on law enforcement investments.
So, with both aisles of politics in general agreement, are the problems going to be solved? I beg to the contrary.
Expansion paves way for corruption
The bipartisan political support for more police officers and more prison guards brings with it its own problems. The strength that Swedish law enforcement is gathering is normally duly built up over the course of decades, not in a few short years, to address problems here and now. As far as manpower goes, the police and the prison institutions are showing cracks already, that may only get worse as more and more people are hurriedly crammed into these booming sectors.
Already by 2022 alarms were sounded by voices at the police academy at Södertörn University that many of the officers they were educating displayed inadequate knowledge about Swedish society, were deemed psychologically unstable, lacked moral character, and had cognitive shortcomings. According to one teacher, some of the police in training did not even meet the intelligence threshold for entering the armed forces. The alternative presented by the whistleblowers stood between raising as many police officers as quickly as possible, and accepting the bad eggs, or allowing the build-up to take its slow, due course. Ultimately, the former alternative would risk eroding public trust in policing and damage the Swedish police’s reputation.
These are uncomfortable truths that have yet to be acknowledged politically. To add to the potential risk of an increasingly corrupt and incompetent police force, many of the recently introduced legislations targeting organised criminality are often at odds with personal rights to integrity and privacy, as warned by legal scholars (criticism of new policing methods also remains one of the today very few legitimate political points scored by the radically progressive left wing).
For example, as Swedish police may now establish limited stop-and-search zones, and who is to say with certainty that this tool will always be used with proportionality, if it is in the hands of a police officer of dubious character? What about covert surveillance, which Swedish police since 2023 are allowed to undertake of citizens even if they are not suspected of any crimes?
Sweden is not immune to the same harsh and questionable policing culture that is for example prevalent in Germany and the United Kingdom, and which was recently criticised by US vice president JD Vance as being in conflict with traditional Western liberties. Honest citizens of Sweden could see over-empowered police violate their rights if the corruption born out of our time’s expansion takes root.
Organised crime has already infiltrated
And that’s only the reason for concern regarding the police, which at the very least is a generally publicly accountable institution. Perhaps more sinister is the bizarre development in Swedish prisons, which are being turned into nests for organised criminality.
The Swedish newspaper Expressen charted out the extensive prevalence of corruption between prison guards and inmates in 2024, reporting about a not insignificant number of new prison hires performing favours for dangerous gang criminals, such as smuggling messages in and out of the prison. The typical profile was a young female guard getting coaxed into relationships with inmates, typically men from the immigrant gang milieus. On several occasions, female guards were reported as having had sex with the inmates in their cells.
In some cases, guards were already in relationships with an inmate when they were hired, which highlights the problem with the prison sector employment rush. When politicians ask for nothing more but more prison cells and more guards, quantities take priority over order. As a result, organised criminality sees its opportunity to infiltrate the institutions.
A similar problem can be seen in the prosecution profession, which, while not being a directly booming sector compared to the police and the prisons, has seen a fair number of nefarious actors with connections to organised criminality seep into its corridors. In 2024, a prosecutor was convicted for having leaked details about a police investigation to a criminal network – that of her own cousin, the infamous Iraqi-descended kingpin Ismail Abdo, who is attributable to a large portion of the rampant gang violence in Sweden. Other cases have seen prosecutors being in relationships with criminals and getting disbarred for intelligence leaks.
Security when hiring for law enforcement is clearly inadequate in Sweden today, when it comes to recognising the ambitions of organised criminality to infiltrate the institutions. This is often pointed out as being a naïvety before Middle Eastern clan culture, which creates family and community structures that Westerners don’t understand. As a result, trust is placed in merited individuals without concern for their potential loyalty to their family and other networks.
So what is the solution?
There is an inherent danger to letting institutions grow in order to catch up with their failures, especially since the root of the problem in the case of Sweden and Western Europe as a whole is deeply entrenched in certain segments of the population. That being, the culture of criminality and disregard for the European model of high-trust societies, that is more often than not immigrated from outside Europe. Every institution needs manpower, and inevitably it is under the guise of aspiring police officers, prison guards, and legal practitioners that the bad eggs infiltrate.
As a recognition of just how complex the problem is however, it must be said that the growing pains that Swedish law enforcement suffers from has universal applicability. Even without mass immigration, a vast expansion such as that being undertaken is going to transform a trusted institution into something different, that needs to rebuild its culture.
European politicians need to find new ways to address the threats to our open and stable society without destroying it themselves. We pride ourselves on the rule of law, but we are opening up to arbitrariness in the long-term with the incessant belief that more money and more manpower translates into efficiency.
One of the gleams of positivity in the Swedish law enforcement build-up is that the government is seriously attempting to outsource internment to other EU countries with free prison capacity. As recently as in February 2025 the government is looking into sending foreign criminals to serve their sentence in their home countries. This grants the Swedish prison system some breathing room, and is the kind of new thinking that is going to take Europe out of its criminal chaos. To add to that, future migration reforms that expel criminal immigrants from our continent will go a long way to restoring security to Europeans without transforming us into police states.