In the tracks of the emerging increasingly violent and increasingly well-organized crime, Sweden is about to change beyond recognition. A once open country, built on trust, is closed step by step. Mistrust grows. No part, no level of society, is spared anymore. The development has gone so far that the Security Police assesses that authority decisions must be anonymised.
“The threats against public servants have reached the level that it is necessary to hide the official’s name and replace it with a traceable job title.”
That’s what it says in Säpo’s statement above the investigation on how public employees must be protected against violence, threats and harassment (SOU 2024:1). According to Säpo’s assessment, anonymization is necessary to preserve the exercise of authority “without undue influence, self-censorship and without corruption and gang crime ruling”.
On Wednesday, the Riksdag supported a proposal by the government which means that police officers who work against organized crime should be able to be anonymous. They will not have to sign decisions and documentation about, for example, interventions, visits and seizures of weapons, drugs and money in their own name. All parties except the Left Party supported the proposal. There will be more to come in that way.
Violence, threats and harassment against employees now occur in all public activities and in basically the entire labor market. It is much easier to list the occupational groups that are not exposed than those that are. In the past, it has mostly been about individuals, when they received a decision that went against them, resorting to threats and violence. That group still exists but is no longer the major problem.
It is not only organized crime that tries to influence authorities through harassment and threats against individual officers, but also groups and individuals who are politically or ideologically motivated, emphasizes Säpo.
“It can lead to systematic harassment from groups of people with connections to such organizations or associations. In these cases, the attacks do not take place out of passion, but are planned threats with the aim of influencing the authorities in the direction the group’s interests are directed towards.
Säpo does not give any examples of such politically and ideologically motivated groups in the statement, but that it may include the more extreme parts of various climate, environmental and animal welfare movements, or the Islamists who, for example, were active in the campaign against the Swedish social services, is hardly a far-fetched thought.
The investigation Säpo expresses its opinion on says no to anonymization, citing that it would have limited effect for the public employees who are most vulnerable. However, it is a conclusion that is questioned by more referral bodies than Säpo. The Crime Prevention Council supports the inquiry’s proposal – apart from the proposal that names should not be replaced by an anonymous designation. Several authorities, among them Correctional Service and Tax Agencyassesses that the inquiry’s proposal is not far-reaching enough.
Other referral bodies, such as The Ombudsman for Justice, are skeptical because they believe that the inquiry’s proposal will mostly be a punch in the air that will not have any major effect in reducing the vulnerability of public employees. Which in and of itself could be taken as income because the investigation does not go far enough.
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Closely connected to the question of public employees’ need for anonymity is the fact that personal information such as home address, telephone number, etc., in the vast majority of cases, is easily searchable online. This means that the private affairs of decision-making officials can be quickly mapped by anyone who so wishes.
“Threats and violence against civil servants have developed to a serious degree at the same time as digital developments have made it easier to find personal information about an individual in a way that was not possible before,” notes Säpo.
These issues are mainly dealt with in a separate investigation which will be completed in November this year. the purpose, explained Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer (M) in connection with the establishment of the investigation, is to make it more difficult for criminals to map people in various search services with the aim of committing crimes.
The Swedish principle of publicity, almost unique when it was added as part of the 1766 freedom of the press regulation, will sooner or later be limited. An order in which basically the entire registered population in Sweden can be mapped by anyone via online databases, by foreign powers as well as by organized crime and criminal street gangs – or any perpetrator of violence – cannot be defended in the way that Swedish society is today looks.
Is it a desirable development? No. As undesirable as the increasingly repressive emerging control and surveillance society. But that’s what happens when boundless utopians are allowed to test their ideas for decades in a full-scale political experiment called Sweden.
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