I've essayed a few occasions on this one suburb of Stockholm, Sweden....Rinkeby. It's on the northwest side of Stockholm, and was a developed project out of the late 1960s where affordable housing was deemed a city-required project. By the time that work was done....years had passed by, and the economic boom had flatten out. A decade later....the mostly empty made great interest for the next economic boom....which brought migrants in, and over the past twenty years....it's become an unofficial ghetto.
This week....one of the Stockholm news sites....Mitti....did a piece on the new police station being developed for the suburb.
If you go through the description...enhanced fortress-like design and protected parking for cop cars....it's designed like some US embassy in Afghanistan....with a ton of security measures for one single suburb station.
The cops for the most part....don't feel safe in this neighborhood, and the city is going to spend near $43-million for the station. It's a fair sum of money.
Mitti noted one law procedure written up for a station like this.....you can't take pictures of the building without special permission. Violating that....could be one-year in prison.
But this brings me to this odd problem which Mitti points out....they didn't plan on special and extra parking for the private vehicles of the cops themselves. So there's some planning going on....where the cops would drive to a specially guarded parking lot in the area, and be taken by bus (I assume) to work, while someone stands there to protect their cars. No one sat there and figured the cost.....but if you had a big security fence....private cameras....roving guards...you could be talking about three or four million Euro a year just to guard two hundred to three hundred private cars on a hour-by-hour basis.
It's hard to imagine this much money going out for a just a suburb police station, and a private car parking lot with enhanced security.
Folks in Stockholm? No one seems to be saying much. It comes out of the city and state budget, and some bureaucrats sign off on this without worrying about political issues later.
Why this much effort on Rinkeby? My humble guess is that it's supposed to send a message and say that the cops are now anchored down, and will react. Course, you'd have to have the city prosecutor be aggressive, and the judge-system invoke some sentences to get people reacting in a different fashion. All of this....five years into the future. So the local public waits....hoping that fortress-Rinkeby has some plus-side to it in the end. Those punks around twelve years old today? They will be the crowd in the next couple of years to face off the fortress crowd.
Footnote: I should also note.....it's yet to be built. So you can expect roving gang activity in after-hours, damage to be a weekly thing, and this likely to take two extra years minimum on top of the original opening date. They might have to hire an extensive guard force....just to protect it while in the construction phase. If you were looking for a great reality show topic....Fortress Rinkeby would be it.
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