To be fair, the supreme court have also taken on itself to change the sentencing. The lack of inmates could be because of a change in 2010. [Edit: the effects of which, are seen now]

Most inmates serving 10+ years in Swedish prisons are drug related cases.

In 2010, the Swedish supreme court decided to dramatically change the policy regarding punishment for drug trafficking. What was previously a 14-year prison sentence suddenly became a 4 year crime. [Update: Prisoners sentenced in 2010 would previosly have been staying in prison for 10+ years but after the change they are now released in 2013 for good behaviour.]

http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev...

Also important to note is in Sweden there is no drug scheduling system like there would be in the Anglo countries. If one were to sell or move a lot of cannabis, it would be the same as selling or moving a lot or heroin or crystal meth.

For small amounts of anything, there are no custodial sentences but the fine will be about half of your monthly salary (or approximately £50 if you have no job).

I have heard anecdotal cases of houses/flats being raided on nothing more than simple suspicion because someone seemed sleepy or had red eyes.

Also happens in Finland. If the police catches you smoking a joint in a park, they will raid your house in most cases. There must be something for them to find, to protect you and to protect the society...

I had a friend in Belgium who was raped in the street one evening by three young men. The police did not take much interest. There was no medical examination done. They said they would call her back to look at some pictures but they never did.

I've fought off muggers several times over the years. I've never bothered to call the police, especially as the actions taken in self-defence might themselves constitute a crime.

Despite all the hype in the cinema, my general impression is that policemen are basically bureaucrats carrying guns, not too different from teachers or bus drivers.

I know it's quite a jump, but it reminds me of the video of the baby being run on by a car while nobody cared. Some people said being involved could be misinterpreted by the police causing you to be jailed or worse.

I've lived in Sweden and Finland. That sounded more like Sweden. In Finland the police is trusted and appreciated. Among the most trusted civic functions in interviews, afaik.

That sounds kind of like the EU countries I've lived in / been to; unless the police is standing next to the crime happening nothing much happens. And that is not just (just, because it is of course) populist talk; it happens a lot. People point out the crime, have images, videos on their phones and the police makes a nice report; you'll never hear about it again.

I had it in Spain. I understand the vigilante crap even if you didn't get hurt; you feel so powerless sitting at the police giving them pics, fingerprints, number plate and make of the getaway car while they are just nodding writing all down and putting it in a drawer knowing they won't do anything.

As a counter point, I was mugged a couple of years back, and reported it after blocking my phone, etc. expecting a "Well there's not much we can do".

The police arrived within 10 minutes and took a statement. Since I'd seen one of the guys beforehand throwing a beer can at a car, they drove me back to that spot and we found the can. They got DNA from it and found out who it was, caught them and they were found guilty (they also picked me up & dropped me off when I needed to do a video lineup).

I then had victim support offer counselling & general contact and was updated with how things were going by post.

They were absolutely excellent as far as I'm concerned, particularly for a fairly minor crime (I was threatened but not actually hit) in a major city (Manchester in the UK, specifically Salford at the time).

Good to hear it can be different! I understand they cannot do this kind of thing every time, but at least learn some bedside manners and comfort the victim. I mean; they see muggings etc every day, but making me feel it's just normal and no-one cares is the bad thing EVEN if they don't do anything. If they actually get DNA/prints and use them, that rocks.

Here in Portugal, my brother left his cellphone unattended and someone took it. We filled a claim with the cops (mostly for insurance purposes) and they got it back after a month or so, without so much as a description of the person who took it (I believe they got an address from the carrier).

Of course, this is just anecdotal.

Crime rates are lower than they've been in a long time. And the reason we know they are, is the crime survey. The crime survey telephones a bunch of random people and asks them if they've been a victim of crime in the past 12 months.

The number of people reporting they're a victim of crime has been dropping since the late 90s.

Did you raise this with the IPCC[0]?

[0]http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/

No - that's purely a form of idealism.

At best you'll get an apology from the police which isn't worth the effort.

Additionally, don't make a complaint about the police unless you fully understand what you are getting yourself into. There is a reasonable chance that they will harass you and your family until they can find some reason to arrest you (or they may just arrest you for no reason).

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/11/police-vendetta-la...

A defence solicitor who was awarded £550,000 in damages from a police force after he was wrongly arrested says officers mounted a vendetta against him after one of his clients was acquitted.

James Watson said Cleveland police officers spent three years pursuing him, costing millions of pounds, without finding any evidence against him, before admitting a series of mistakes.

Yeah that's about right.

It's about the arrests, not the crimes.

The police are there to:

- Do you for speeding.

- Protect the establishment.

- Threaten violence.

- Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations.

They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact control and to keep the powerful powerful.

This is not how a democratic nation is supposed to work. So please don't hold up this characterization of the police as something which is inevitable. The democratic ideal is that the police have a national monopoly on the legal use of violence, and the use of this violence is dictated by the laws and the courts. This is how well-working democratic nations work, and it is indeed how the police force in my home country works.

That anything else can be said about the USA today (maybe also the UK?), is just a testament to the scale of the democratic problems you guys have. You are really deep into it, and it doesn't seem like you realize the extent of the problem.

It is inevitable. Every society has descended into this so far, until there is a revolution.

Us people in the UK realise what is happening. At some point, the moment will occur when the state oversteps the mark on something and the shit will get flipped country-wide.

Yup, just said the same as you. Hobbes and Hayek both anticipated this.

Revolution is the only way out.

Thanks for posting this. Just the motivation I need to read The Road To Serfdom which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.

No, it isn't, but it appears to be the endgame of representative democracy. I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan, or perhaps Hayek's Road to Serfdom, if you haven't already, as both anticipated this exact malaise. The US and the UK are in the terminal stages of decline.

The representative democratic ideal is ultimately revealed to be a fiction, and the rule of law is a falsehood - for without a universally applied rule of law, there is no rule of law - just authoritarianism - and our rule of law is decidedly not universal, and never has been. One set of rules for us, one for them.

All representative democracy eventually declines under the same disease of creeping authoritarianism due to the inevitable desire of entrenched power structures and bureaucracies to self-sustain and expand. This should not be mistaken for malice, rather it's the inevitable output of a system optimised for self-preservation.

The only solution to my mind while maintaining a democratic ideal is either strict sortition, or direct democracy.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why hasn't my native Norway ended up in this spot? Claiming "it is inevitable" isn't a valid argument, projecting to unlikely-seeming future scenarios can be used to prove anything. Just because two big nations have ended up with a screwed-up political system doesn't prove that it is an inevitability.

Try arguing with a Norwegian police officer. Even calmly. Odds of ending up in jail overnight are pretty high, though you might find one with a sense of humour now.

Norway is one of those countries where shouting insults at a police officer can be illegal where shouting those same insults at a random strangers would not be - there explicitly is one law for public officials and one for the rest.

The idea of public officials being above the rest is deeply embedded in the Norwegian system, and only started fading with the growth of the labour movement, and steady inclusion of the labour movement into the establishment starting with the first lasting Ap (labour party) government in 1935 onwards. Even then, Ap took up the baton (..), and wielded it against the groups to their own left, with extensive illegal political surveillance for decades.

The reason Norway is now as civilized as it is, is simple:

Norway eventually got filthy rich thanks to the oil. The average salary in Norway is about 70% above the average salary in the UK, for example, and the salary curve is far flatter.

We've had social democratic ministers from a party that used argue for revolution and was an early member of Komintern that are millionaires. A long range of our past "threats" to the establishment are now wealthy and firmly embedded in the establishment. The class struggle in Norway is largely "on hold", and the police is being wielded against immigrants instead.

Do you have any sources to back up these claims? Some can probably be documented with a bit of historical digging, but most of this is just opinion which does not match my experience.

Not cooperating with the police will get you in trouble anywhere in the world.

> I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan

WELP. Time to find ourselves a king.

Could you please add a bit of explanation as to why you are so confident that this interpretation of the role of the police should be regarded as categorical fact?

Particularly in the case of UK, if your knowledge allows, given that we operate, at least in principle, an explicitly Peelian system of policing, in contrast to, for example, our European neighbours.

Consider the UK police treatment of demonstrators. It's one of the most brutal in Western Europe, and in many countries the very idea of a practice like kettling brings out images of fascist dictatorships.

I'm Norwegian. In Norway, government officials are often found participating in May day demonstrations, and it's a public holiday. Imagine my shock the first May day I experienced after moving to the UK, with police lining up units on horseback with shields all around and slowly forcing demonstrators into a smaller and smaller space and keeping them their for hours.

How does that fit with Peelian principles to you? It's the kind of method that is pretty much designed to provoke violence and distrust.

I too think that kettling is provocative and unnecessary. There is a balance that we have to strike as a society between, on the one hand, protection of property and freedom from violence, and on the other, freedom of speech and expression.

Personally, I would rather we allowed more of the latter at the (potential) expense of less of the former, perhaps with some civil compensation scheme for any who might be affected.

I also think that we should allow much more disruption than we currently do - that is often one of the ways protesters make themselves heard. If protests were allowed to make more of an impact then people might feel less inclined to cause trouble. Unfortunately any impact on the great economic machine is seen as almost taboo in some, rather influential, quarters, which makes moves in that direction less likely.

Another part of the puzzle is community leadership, whatever 'community' means in the particular context. The leadership doesn't need to be centralised, but if people don't engage with the police in situations like that then things can get out of control. Though again this is another area where I think the police are often at fault: following orders rather than engaging with people.

All that said, I don't agree with madaxe's statement: "(the police) are categorically not there to help you. They never have been.", and to be frank I don't see how your example shows that it is so.

Agree entirely. I've learned this over the last few years.