9 ms·

A new law in Sweden lets police seize unexplained luxury goods

52 points by pingou 2y ago

andersco 2y ago
https://archive.ph/v7TRe https://archive.ph/v7TRe
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
So, as in america, again, you're guilty until you prove you're innocent, by either wasting a lot of money on legal costs, or alternatively, letting them steal whatever they took from you... sad.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  TBH both US and Sweden have comparable high wealth inequality, and very high ratio of mean/median wealth. Their rich want their poor to remain poor.
  - psd1 2y ago
    Your first claim appears to be false. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...
    - dagw 2y ago
      You're looking at income inequality, not wealth inequality. While Sweden has relatively low income inequality, it has extremely high wealth inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
      - lifestyleguru 2y ago
        > While Sweden has relatively low income inequality, it has extremely high wealth inequality. The wealth is old industrial and aristocratic money. Salaried people don't accumulate wealth.
        dagw 2y ago
        Indeed. The low income inequality is in many ways a contributing factor to the high wealth inequality, since it is virtually impossible to become wealthy in Sweden just by working hard and earning a salary. Virtually no 'normal' jobs have a salary much above $200k. Whereas in the US that salary is quite achievable for a lot of people by just working your way up in a normal corporation. Even CEO salaries in the biggest Swedish companies rarely break $1m and if you break $2m you have among the very highest salaries in Sweden.
      - psd1 2y ago
        Ah, excuse my imprecision!
  - jdmoreira 2y ago
    Sweden has much higher wealth inequality than the US. Its higher than Russia even
andrewstuart 2y ago
Proceeds of crime law is fine if it is decided in a court with judicial oversight and legal representation.
- cge 2y ago
  It seems this is in between the civil forfeiture as it is applied in some places in the US (police seize mostly cash, immediately, regardless of any documentation the owner might show, and can keep it unless the owner goes to court and successfully argues for it back), and the unexplained wealth orders of the UK, which if I recall correctly involve needing to convince courts to approve the seizure first, involve a chance for documentation, and are primarily used for major properties. With this, it seems police can seize goods immediately, but have to return them unless they can convince the courts otherwise. But, this is police seizing goods, and seemingly mostly small personal goods. How are people supposed to prove they acquired those lawfully on demand, immediately? While walking somewhere, can you provide documentation for how you acquired for all your clothes (yes, the photo apparently shows clothes being seized)? Your phone? Your laptop? Any jewellery, which might have been inherited? And, if this is somehow to combat street violence, why is the only concrete example of a seizure given in the article of someone with a watch and cash at an airport? For that matter, if the person was carrying that much cash at an airport, presumably involving an international flight, how were already-present currency controls not applicable? If she declared the cash, that would have involved some documentation; did they seize it anyway? If she didn't declare the cash, surely it could already have been seized? Or is this simply a matter of seizing possessions and arresting people who aren't read as being in the right class position to be carrying those possessions? It all seems rather strangely incongruous.
miohtama 2y ago
"There is no consensus on the main cause of this surge in violence" If I am not misunderstood, the consensus in Sweden and globally is that the situation is caused by lax immigration policies and taking in too many immigrants who have not been able to integrate to the society.
- mac_iver 2y ago
  Immigration policy is one factor, but it's too easy to blame everything on a single group in society. While Sweden's immigration debate gets lots of attention abroad, other problems like our corrupt private school system and cocaine use among the wealthy don't make as many headlines.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    I'm sure that poor people would love to have some cocaine too if they could afford it.
- redeux 2y ago
  Are you saying that the violence is caused by the immigrants directly or indirectly? I can’t say for Sweden but in the Texas immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than citizens[1]. There doesn’t seem to be a good source of data for the US as a whole. 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...
  - mihaic 2y ago
    The profile of the average Swedish immigrant is different than the average US one. Many EU countries have counted and have seen immigrants commit disproportionally more crime.
    - nielsbot 2y ago
      Is there a study I can read for this?
rurp 2y ago
I'm not a fan of this law and expect it will end up being abused as much as civil forfeiture in the US. That said, it is interesting to see a stop and frisk law that actually targets wealthy people for once.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  It targets poor people with expensive items. Wealthy people can explain how they could afford them.
  - bjornsing 2y ago
    But explanations come after the stop and frisk though…
- GauntletWizard 2y ago
  Doesn't Target wealthy people. It targets unexplained wealth. Actually wealthy people will be able to show a bank account statement or say "My father is X" or whatever and get out of it. It is targeting thieves who are running around with stolen goods, but it will actually affect people who have conscientiously saved and flaunt their few pieces of a hard-earned luxury.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  We’re already starting to see some weird consequences of a closely related law change that allows the authorities to immediately seize assets from people with unpaid debts. For example, there was a news report recently of a woman who lent her car to a friend who was in debt. He was stopped by the police and the car was seized. She complained and could prove she was the legal owner of the car. But that didn’t matter. The authorities sold her car anyway and gave the money to the guy’s lenders. Now they’re saying this was not a mistake and you should be very careful who you lend your car to.
  - buzer 2y ago
    How far does that go to? If you rent a car and get stopped by police does that allow police to seize and sell the car? What if you are driving company car? Company plane?
danielfoster 2y ago
It sounds like this law will be used to target drug gangs and organized crime. Regardless, I don’t see how it can be applied without discriminating against minorities. I highly doubt the woman at the airport, who the article states was stopped for having expensive jewelry, was white and Swedish. If the police stopped you on the street and asked how you were able to afford a MacBook or XYZ, would you be able to “prove” it? This law is extremely asinine.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  > If the police stopped you on the street and asked how you were able to afford a MacBook or XYZ, would you be able to “prove” it? Yes, because I have a legal occupation.
  - danielfoster 2y ago
    Do you carry your payment slips with you? What if the item in question is deemed too expensive for your role? Yes, you could probably pull up your work email or show the bank deposits, but my point is that this is an arbitrary standard that cannot be consistently enforced.
    - stackskipton 2y ago
      Most people have their bank application on their phone so you could pull it up and prove it that way. I do agree it will likely be heavily abused like Civil Forfeiture in United States and wouldn't recommend it to Swedish but it's a democracy.
      - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2y ago
        I'm not unlocking my phone for a cop.
    - attendant3446 2y ago
      In Sweden you have a personnummer and tax data is available to practically everyone. And that's the main measure they use for everything. So I'm pretty sure that the police use this data to get an idea of what you can and can't afford.
rdtsc 2y ago
> The Oresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, which opened in 2000, made illegal firearms and drugs easier to transfer. > 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 Is Denmark known for illegal firearms and drugs export? The way it's written it's almost blaming Denmark for its issues. And besides, wasn't that 20 years ago. Surely the illegal firearms and crime would have flooded right in, starting in 2000 until 2010. What happened 10 years ago that started this crime wave? > law came into force allowing them to detain people flaunting ostentatious luxury goods There is also no way this law won't be abused. Everyone is looking at US cops robbing people in plain daylight of cash and are horrified. Except, other countries' government officials which are getting very excited by such prospects, it seems: "We too, can rob people!"
- bjornsing 2y ago
  I live in Malmö, on the Swedish side of that bridge. The police quite regularly stops local youths on their way to Denmark with guns and grenades. The Danish minister of justice recently referred to them as “Swedish child soldiers” and threatened to close the border. So yes, most Danes would probably object to that characterization.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Also living in Malmö, and the Oresund bridge does share some “blame”, but only because its an actual open border to the schengen area. From what I’m told, people ride trains through europe with weaponry from eastern europe, where black market arms are easier to acquire, through a combination of leaky borders and post-war redundant stock.
jaco6 2y ago
It would be easier to simply deport immigrants, most of whom are committing fraud by claiming asylum under false pretenses.
- dartos 2y ago
  What exactly do you mean by “easier?” What steps would need to be taken for mass deportation?
Dig1t 2y ago
>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. Sweden has super strict gun control laws. This is a pretty good case for the argument that the low levels of gun violence that Europe used to enjoy were more due to cultural values instead of strict laws.
bookofjoe 2y ago
https://archive.ph/L9Pxa https://archive.ph/L9Pxa
monkeycantype 2y ago
In Australia, and I expect most western countries, it’s pointless discussing immigration without acknowledging it is being used as a lever by business to suppress wages and working conditions in the destination country, and that to do so immigrants are arriving under legal conditions that limit their ability to negotiate fair treatment and mean they live without political representation. The deteriorating social conditions observed are not a consequence of there being more foreigners, but of deliberate policy decisions to make it more difficult for immigrants in some visa categories to prosper and fully participate in society, a deliberate decision to extract max value from people for minimum reward
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  A lot of immigrants come as refugees from war torn countries, they already have problems, and their new country might not provide resources to help them deal with those problems well, especially the kids. They’ll be fine in one or two generations, but right now is trying for them and their new countries, and there is definitely blow back from that. I’m not sure the economic lever really exists, but then again it might just be where I live since those immigrants are usually making lots of money as techies while the refugees aren’t really seen as sources of cheap labor (although the adults invariably get entry-level jobs while teenagers need help to integrate, work not being an option by the standards of the areas they settle in).
tommiegannert 2y ago
What in the actual F is going on. I sincerely hope my cursory reading of the law was wrong. This law[1] seems pretty much to be a presumed-guilty-until-you've-proven-yourself-innocent thing. Seems they've entered some kind of reverse Minority Report middle ground, where they don't have to prove you committed a crime. If there is reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed for you to own that Rolex, it's gone. Possibly that means "you couldn't prove it was acquired legally." There goes any chance of me returning to Sweden, I guess. This is going downhill fast. [1] (Swedish) https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2024782-om-forfarandet-vid-forverkande-av_sfs-2024-782/ https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...
- Y_Y 2y ago
  I think discussing people from wearing Rolexes is a social good.

52 points by pingou 2y ago

https://archive.ph/v7TRe https://archive.ph/v7TRe

So, as in america, again, you're guilty until you prove you're innocent, by either wasting a lot of money on legal costs, or alternatively, letting them steal whatever they took from you... sad.

lifestyleguru 2y ago
TBH both US and Sweden have comparable high wealth inequality, and very high ratio of mean/median wealth. Their rich want their poor to remain poor.
- psd1 2y ago
  Your first claim appears to be false. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...
  - dagw 2y ago
    You're looking at income inequality, not wealth inequality. While Sweden has relatively low income inequality, it has extremely high wealth inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
    - lifestyleguru 2y ago
      > While Sweden has relatively low income inequality, it has extremely high wealth inequality. The wealth is old industrial and aristocratic money. Salaried people don't accumulate wealth.
      - dagw 2y ago
        Indeed. The low income inequality is in many ways a contributing factor to the high wealth inequality, since it is virtually impossible to become wealthy in Sweden just by working hard and earning a salary. Virtually no 'normal' jobs have a salary much above $200k. Whereas in the US that salary is quite achievable for a lot of people by just working your way up in a normal corporation. Even CEO salaries in the biggest Swedish companies rarely break $1m and if you break $2m you have among the very highest salaries in Sweden.
    - psd1 2y ago
      Ah, excuse my imprecision!
- jdmoreira 2y ago
  Sweden has much higher wealth inequality than the US. Its higher than Russia even

andrewstuart 2y ago

Proceeds of crime law is fine if it is decided in a court with judicial oversight and legal representation.

cge 2y ago
It seems this is in between the civil forfeiture as it is applied in some places in the US (police seize mostly cash, immediately, regardless of any documentation the owner might show, and can keep it unless the owner goes to court and successfully argues for it back), and the unexplained wealth orders of the UK, which if I recall correctly involve needing to convince courts to approve the seizure first, involve a chance for documentation, and are primarily used for major properties. With this, it seems police can seize goods immediately, but have to return them unless they can convince the courts otherwise. But, this is police seizing goods, and seemingly mostly small personal goods. How are people supposed to prove they acquired those lawfully on demand, immediately? While walking somewhere, can you provide documentation for how you acquired for all your clothes (yes, the photo apparently shows clothes being seized)? Your phone? Your laptop? Any jewellery, which might have been inherited? And, if this is somehow to combat street violence, why is the only concrete example of a seizure given in the article of someone with a watch and cash at an airport? For that matter, if the person was carrying that much cash at an airport, presumably involving an international flight, how were already-present currency controls not applicable? If she declared the cash, that would have involved some documentation; did they seize it anyway? If she didn't declare the cash, surely it could already have been seized? Or is this simply a matter of seizing possessions and arresting people who aren't read as being in the right class position to be carrying those possessions? It all seems rather strangely incongruous.

miohtama 2y ago

"There is no consensus on the main cause of this surge in violence" If I am not misunderstood, the consensus in Sweden and globally is that the situation is caused by lax immigration policies and taking in too many immigrants who have not been able to integrate to the society.

mac_iver 2y ago
Immigration policy is one factor, but it's too easy to blame everything on a single group in society. While Sweden's immigration debate gets lots of attention abroad, other problems like our corrupt private school system and cocaine use among the wealthy don't make as many headlines.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  I'm sure that poor people would love to have some cocaine too if they could afford it.
redeux 2y ago
Are you saying that the violence is caused by the immigrants directly or indirectly? I can’t say for Sweden but in the Texas immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than citizens[1]. There doesn’t seem to be a good source of data for the US as a whole. 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...
- mihaic 2y ago
  The profile of the average Swedish immigrant is different than the average US one. Many EU countries have counted and have seen immigrants commit disproportionally more crime.
  - nielsbot 2y ago
    Is there a study I can read for this?

rurp 2y ago

I'm not a fan of this law and expect it will end up being abused as much as civil forfeiture in the US. That said, it is interesting to see a stop and frisk law that actually targets wealthy people for once.

foxglacier 2y ago
It targets poor people with expensive items. Wealthy people can explain how they could afford them.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  But explanations come after the stop and frisk though…
GauntletWizard 2y ago
Doesn't Target wealthy people. It targets unexplained wealth. Actually wealthy people will be able to show a bank account statement or say "My father is X" or whatever and get out of it. It is targeting thieves who are running around with stolen goods, but it will actually affect people who have conscientiously saved and flaunt their few pieces of a hard-earned luxury.
bjornsing 2y ago
We’re already starting to see some weird consequences of a closely related law change that allows the authorities to immediately seize assets from people with unpaid debts. For example, there was a news report recently of a woman who lent her car to a friend who was in debt. He was stopped by the police and the car was seized. She complained and could prove she was the legal owner of the car. But that didn’t matter. The authorities sold her car anyway and gave the money to the guy’s lenders. Now they’re saying this was not a mistake and you should be very careful who you lend your car to.
- buzer 2y ago
  How far does that go to? If you rent a car and get stopped by police does that allow police to seize and sell the car? What if you are driving company car? Company plane?

danielfoster 2y ago

It sounds like this law will be used to target drug gangs and organized crime. Regardless, I don’t see how it can be applied without discriminating against minorities. I highly doubt the woman at the airport, who the article states was stopped for having expensive jewelry, was white and Swedish. If the police stopped you on the street and asked how you were able to afford a MacBook or XYZ, would you be able to “prove” it? This law is extremely asinine.

knallfrosch 2y ago
> If the police stopped you on the street and asked how you were able to afford a MacBook or XYZ, would you be able to “prove” it? Yes, because I have a legal occupation.
- danielfoster 2y ago
  Do you carry your payment slips with you? What if the item in question is deemed too expensive for your role? Yes, you could probably pull up your work email or show the bank deposits, but my point is that this is an arbitrary standard that cannot be consistently enforced.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    Most people have their bank application on their phone so you could pull it up and prove it that way. I do agree it will likely be heavily abused like Civil Forfeiture in United States and wouldn't recommend it to Swedish but it's a democracy.
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2y ago
      I'm not unlocking my phone for a cop.
  - attendant3446 2y ago
    In Sweden you have a personnummer and tax data is available to practically everyone. And that's the main measure they use for everything. So I'm pretty sure that the police use this data to get an idea of what you can and can't afford.

rdtsc 2y ago

> The Oresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, which opened in 2000, made illegal firearms and drugs easier to transfer. > 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 Is Denmark known for illegal firearms and drugs export? The way it's written it's almost blaming Denmark for its issues. And besides, wasn't that 20 years ago. Surely the illegal firearms and crime would have flooded right in, starting in 2000 until 2010. What happened 10 years ago that started this crime wave? > law came into force allowing them to detain people flaunting ostentatious luxury goods There is also no way this law won't be abused. Everyone is looking at US cops robbing people in plain daylight of cash and are horrified. Except, other countries' government officials which are getting very excited by such prospects, it seems: "We too, can rob people!"

bjornsing 2y ago
I live in Malmö, on the Swedish side of that bridge. The police quite regularly stops local youths on their way to Denmark with guns and grenades. The Danish minister of justice recently referred to them as “Swedish child soldiers” and threatened to close the border. So yes, most Danes would probably object to that characterization.
- dijit 2y ago
  Also living in Malmö, and the Oresund bridge does share some “blame”, but only because its an actual open border to the schengen area. From what I’m told, people ride trains through europe with weaponry from eastern europe, where black market arms are easier to acquire, through a combination of leaky borders and post-war redundant stock.

jaco6 2y ago

It would be easier to simply deport immigrants, most of whom are committing fraud by claiming asylum under false pretenses.

dartos 2y ago
What exactly do you mean by “easier?” What steps would need to be taken for mass deportation?

Dig1t 2y ago

>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. Sweden has super strict gun control laws. This is a pretty good case for the argument that the low levels of gun violence that Europe used to enjoy were more due to cultural values instead of strict laws.

bookofjoe 2y ago

https://archive.ph/L9Pxa https://archive.ph/L9Pxa

monkeycantype 2y ago

In Australia, and I expect most western countries, it’s pointless discussing immigration without acknowledging it is being used as a lever by business to suppress wages and working conditions in the destination country, and that to do so immigrants are arriving under legal conditions that limit their ability to negotiate fair treatment and mean they live without political representation. The deteriorating social conditions observed are not a consequence of there being more foreigners, but of deliberate policy decisions to make it more difficult for immigrants in some visa categories to prosper and fully participate in society, a deliberate decision to extract max value from people for minimum reward

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
A lot of immigrants come as refugees from war torn countries, they already have problems, and their new country might not provide resources to help them deal with those problems well, especially the kids. They’ll be fine in one or two generations, but right now is trying for them and their new countries, and there is definitely blow back from that. I’m not sure the economic lever really exists, but then again it might just be where I live since those immigrants are usually making lots of money as techies while the refugees aren’t really seen as sources of cheap labor (although the adults invariably get entry-level jobs while teenagers need help to integrate, work not being an option by the standards of the areas they settle in).

tommiegannert 2y ago

What in the actual F is going on. I sincerely hope my cursory reading of the law was wrong. This law[1] seems pretty much to be a presumed-guilty-until-you've-proven-yourself-innocent thing. Seems they've entered some kind of reverse Minority Report middle ground, where they don't have to prove you committed a crime. If there is reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed for you to own that Rolex, it's gone. Possibly that means "you couldn't prove it was acquired legally." There goes any chance of me returning to Sweden, I guess. This is going downhill fast. [1] (Swedish) https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2024782-om-forfarandet-vid-forverkande-av_sfs-2024-782/ https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...

Y_Y 2y ago
I think discussing people from wearing Rolexes is a social good.