Chiefs of Police: We have not worked with the concept of clans

Information from Deputy Chief of the National Police Mats Löfving that there are at least 40 criminal clans in Sweden has dominated news reports and has become a battlefield in political debate.

But within their own authority, many are taken to bed.

– It is an atmosphere a bit of panic within our part of the organization. They were not at all prepared for this and do not know how to communicate what applies to networks here, says one of several sources within the Stockholm Region.

Others welcome the discussion that began after Mats Löfving’s unexpected move.

– It is liberating in its own way that the image of the problem comes to light, thinks a person in a managerial position within the Stockholm intelligence department.

That which created confusion is that Mats Löfving’s description does not have a clear basis in the intelligence records of the seven police regions. Where are clans really described? How big are they? And have all the clans really come to Sweden for the purpose of committing crimes? These are some of the issues that still remain in the air.

– We have not worked with this concept and we do not have a documented figure, says Magnus Mowitz, acting head of the intelligence department of the Stockholm Region.

After thinking about it for a while, he estimates that “a handful” of the approximately 50 criminal networks in the Stockholm region are wholly or partially related by kinship.

– It has always happened that criminals have been related, for example, in Swedish robbery gangs. But for us, it doesn’t mean an important distinction.

The police also reason in a similar way in other regions.

– I don’t see any difference between motorcycle gangs and these family networks. It is a culture of silence and you are loyal to your criminal network, says Jan Hofvenstam, head of the intelligence section in the Eastern Police Region and does not want to give any numbers.

Mitt region reports on the other hand, two family networks in Uppsala, with the reservation that there may be more in Västerås and Gävle.

– It’s difficult to put a label on it that, by definition, they are considered family-based criminal networks with a clan structure, says Commissioner Jonas Eronen.

The Bergslagen and Nord regions claim that they have not registered any criminal networks that match Mats Löfving’s description. In the Southern Region, intelligence chief Patrik Andersson counts between 8 and 10 in and around Malmö. And from the West Region come the only exact figures: a total of 12 networks, of which 7 in Gothenburg and the rest in Borås, Falkenberg, Laholm, Trollhättan and Uddevalla.

– Family networks that we have come from the Middle East, based in the Levant countries Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine and Syria, says Gothenburg Police Chief Erik Nord.

Unlike his colleagues in other parts of the country, he likes to talk about what he sees as the importance of clan structures for understanding certain crimes:

– In these countries there was a very weak or nonexistent state and then these clan systems were formed, it became a way to survive. But when you move it to Sweden, it can easily go off the rails. You ignore paying taxes and do as little as you want. Then you easily run into organized crime. Since the capacity for violence is there, it goes very fast.

DN information is displayed in total that it is not clear in which part of the country almost half of the 40 clans declared by Mats Löfving are located. Various sources claim that the uncertainty may stem from the legal restrictions governing the information that the police can collect. Relationship and ethnic origin are considered confidential personal data and cannot normally be recorded, according to the Criminal Data Act.

– That is why we have never talked about clans, but about networks ordered by place of residence, says an employee of the Stockholm Region.

In that case, the consequence may have been that certain networks were misleadingly categorized. For example, the unofficially best known family network in the Stockholm region, based in Sollentuna, is found in the police register under the name “Tureberg network”, see the article opposite.

But according to several people there is also another explanation. After DN’s disclosure in 2013 that the Skåne police had created an illegal database, the so-called ‘gypsy registry’, a warning must have been spread within parts of the police organization regarding the collection of information on family networks. What started with a survey of a couple hundred people affected by a Roma family dispute turned into a record of almost 5,000 people, including many children and others who were not the subject of criminal suspicion.

– The mistakes we made led us to be very restrictive in our registry of, for example, who are children and who, which can sometimes make it difficult to identify young people who are at risk of being drawn into crime, says Patrik Andersson of the Skåne Police.

The head of the national intelligence department, Linda H Staaf, says that national routines fundamentally changed, and that this, according to her, had a downside.

– When I took office in 2015, I probably felt like I had gone in the wrong direction. They were so afraid of making mistakes that they did not store the information we really needed in the fight against crime. There we have increased the knowledge so that I think we are in a pretty good balance.