The police should be allowed to use secret means of coercion against children under the age of 15, the government’s investigators suggest.
Children must be intercepted on suspicion of, for example, murder, serious weapons offenses and terrorist offences.
Today, secret means of coercion may not be used against children under the age of 15. But as younger and younger children are recruited by the criminal gangs, this has become a problem for the police, who, for example, are not allowed to access the mobile phones of minors.
According to the government, the law must be adapted to a new reality, and now investigator Gunnel Lindberg presents his proposals.
She proposes that secret means of coercion should be allowed to be used against children under the age of 15 in certain cases.
Longer detentions
The police must be allowed to use, among other things, secret wiretapping, secret camera surveillance and secret data reading against children if they are suspected of crimes punishable by at least four years in prison, or certain terrorist crimes. Secret room listening, bugging, must be used for crimes with a minimum sentence of five years.
Preventive coercive measures must also be used against children in certain cases, according to the investigator. It is a law that came as late as last autumn and which gives the police the right to intercept criminal environments even before a crime has taken place. This must also be used against children for crimes with a minimum sentence of five years.
Gunnel Lindberg also proposes that young people under the age of 18 should be able to be detained for a longer period of time. Just three years ago, the limit for how long children can be detained was set at three months. It is now proposed that it be increased to five months.
Already today, however, many young people, mainly those who have committed serious crimes, are in custody for significantly longer than three months. The limit may be exceeded if there are special reasons.
Dna sample in register
Another proposal is that the possibility of using house searches and body searches against children under 15 should be expanded. Today, children can only be body searched if there are special reasons, which has been equated to a crime with at least one year in prison on the penalty scale.
In addition, biometric data, such as DNA samples, fingerprints and voice samples, must be taken from children who are reasonably suspected of crimes in order to be entered into the police’s biometric register.