Sweden: Police Struggle to Find Recruits as Govt Demands Diversity Hires

The Swedish government has said it wants to greatly expand the number of police across the country but a recent report has suggested hundreds of recruitment places remain unfilled.

The government has promised to increase the size of the police force by 10,000 by 2024 but is already running into problems with 400 places remaining empty this semester in the country’s police training courses, broadcaster Sveriges Radio reports.

The police authority has also been commissioned by the government to hire new police for different backgrounds, primarily women and ethnic minorities, in order to make the police force more diverse, but many frontline officers are sceptical of the probability of fulfilling the request.

“We need those skills, especially as the police force is growing. There is a language competence but also what I call cultural competence,” police chief Max Lutteman has insisted.

Of the police candidates admitted to training programmes last Autumn, around ten per cent were from migrant backgrounds, just over two per cent of them women.

“I hope they feel that you represent a little more diversity. That they recognise themselves more, when there is a wider culture within the police,” said a police candidate named Natascha whose father is Iranian and mother is Danish.

Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven has denied there is a link between mass migration and the growing problem of gang-related shootings and bombings despite reports claiming that the majority of shooting suspects in the southern city of Malmö come from migrant backgrounds.

“The segregation is because there is too low employment and too high unemployment in these areas. But that would have been the same regardless of who had lived there. If you put people born in Sweden under the same conditions, you get the same result,” Löfven claimed last November.

Other studies have shown that migrants are by far the majority of suspects in assault rape cases in which the victim does not know her rapist beforehand, with as many as eight in ten such cases involving foreign-born men as suspects.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com