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THe aim, Your browser does not support the element.says Erik Nord, head of a team of detectives in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, is “to get a grip on the situation”. Police are certainly getting a grip on something. In the week after November 8th, when a law came into force allowing them to detain people flaunting ostentatious luxury goods, the Gothenburg made 30 arrests. One woman arrived at the airport wearing a Rolex watch and carrying 1.5m kronor ($137,000) in cash. She picked a bad week.The new law allows police to seize expensive goods even from people who are not under investigation for a crime, if they cannot prove they acquired them lawfully. Police could arrest a teenager sporting a gold watch, or someone driving a Porsche whom they know is on the dole, and confiscate their swag. The idea is to undermine gang leaders who recruit youngsters by dangling such wares.Politicians have been hyping the new measure. At a press conference introducing it, Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, called it the biggest reform since the Swedish criminal code was introduced in 1965. A week after it came into force, police around the country had seized goods worth 10m kronor.The impulse behind it is a sense of helplessness over a long-term rise in violent crime. Ten years ago Sweden, with 10m people, had one of the lowest rates of gun violence and murder in Europe. It now has one of the highest, averaging a shooting a day. In 2022, 62 people were shot dead; last year it was 53.There is no consensus on the main cause of this surge in violence, says Sven Granath, a criminologist at Stockholm University. Gangs have mushroomed. The Oresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, which opened in 2000, made illegal firearms and drugs easier to transfer. Other proposed factors include the country’s widening income gap, the dismantling of welfare institutions, high immigration rates and poor integration.Law enforcement was slow to respond at first, hampered by lenient penalties for gun crimes and strict data-protection laws. That is slowly changing. Since 2023 a new law has made it easier to tap suspects’ phones, helping to improve the low clearance rate for murders. The government has also declared several time-limited weapons amnesties, during which illegal firearms can be surrendered to the police without criminal charges, bringing in thousands of illegal guns.Critics of the luxury law say it disregards the presumption of innocence and that its guidelines for searches are vague. Other countries, including Britain, allow seizure of property through “unexplained wealth orders”, but these are usually used to take yachts or flats from big-time criminals or oligarchs. American police have been excoriated for abusing a similar procedure, known as civil asset forfeiture. The Swedish law requires court approval to keep the goodies, and advocates say it is needed to stop gangs’ efforts to recruit people under 15, the age of criminal responsibility. Whether it will help bring down the rate of shootings is doubtful.
