Thousands of additional border controls in and out of Sweden – Radio Sweden in Easy Swedish

Almost a year ago, on 1 August 2023, a new law came into effect. Under the new law, the police can search people and vehicles without suspecting that a crime has been committed. According to the law, the police have the right to carry out a body search of people entering and leaving Sweden. A body search means checking the clothes and bags a person is wearing. The police can check a person without suspecting that they have committed a crime.

After the new law It came into effect, and there were more than 3,000 border controls into Sweden. Most of the checks are taking place in southern Sweden, including at Malmö Central Station and the Øresund Bridge, the bridge between Sweden and Denmark.

Elizabeth Nelson He works Inside the police. She says some people take a lot of money with them when they leave Sweden and the police want to stop that.

– A lot of money is being taken out of Sweden to other countries in Europe and we want to stop this flow.

Many organizations and Authorities have warned that the new law will be discriminatory. They argue that some people should be checked more than others, because of where they come from or how they look. But Elizabeth Nelson says police choose who to check based on information they receive about international gangs.

– There are certain countries where it is perhaps more important that international criminal networks come from and then we have intelligence on which to base our control.

According to the police it is over. 8,000 crimes linked to international gangs stopped in Sweden this year But there is no information on how many of those 8,000 crimes were detected by border checks. Mats Berggren works for the police. He says they don’t know whether border controls have helped them detect criminals and stop crime. But he says they will find out.

– This is a new legislation and so this system needs to be completed so that we can search for it in a good way. So we will be able to inform the government about it, according to the mandate.

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