Being taken into custody due to excessive intoxication, also called an LOB, is a big infringement of one’s personal liberty and integrity and takes place without the right to a fair trial. The number of such cases in Sweden average at around 60 000 per year, with the point of an action being to provide a safe space for the intoxicated individual to sober up.In this study, the judicial requirements, internal protocols and guidelines which police are to follow in a case of excessive intoxication are laid out and examined. By closely examining two decisions from the Parliamentary Ombudsmen (JO) we have identified situations in which police have arrested someone on subjective grounds, rather than following the internal guidelines. This survey, including 30 police officers from the local district Gothenburg City, was conducted based on the decisions from the Parliamentary Ombudsmen (JO). Officers were given two real world case studies to later describe how they would have acted in the situation. Answers were analysed via code and were thereafter compared to the legal code to make a judgement on officers’ knowledge of LOB. In the first case study, 80% of officers chose to arrest according to LOB, and the remainder chose to reject alternatively remove the person according to The Police Act 13 §In the second case study, where subjective judgement had to be used, 44% chose to arrest according to LOB, 53% chose to follow The Police Act 13 § and 3% answered with answers that were difficult to classify. In the Parliamentary Ombudsmen’s (JO) opinion regarding a similar scenario which was presented in the second case study, there has been critique aimed towards the police officer that decided to arrest the individual for intoxication. It is noticeable that 43% would have chosen to arrest in a similar situation to the one that the Parliamentary Ombudsman had earlier criticized.To examine if there are arrests which take place which lack an actual legal precedent, 71 so called LOB protocols have been looked at, where around 40% of cases lack a satisfactory reasoning as to why the arrest has taken place. This means that there is a legal pitfall when one doesn’t define specifically enough in the LOB protocol why one has made an arrest. From these results, there is an indication that there is a risk that arrests take place which lack legal weight. Finally, the study also highlights that there is a lack of necessities required to care for the arrested in Gothenburg.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-180105 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Jensen, Christian, Molin, Anton |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Enheten för polisutbildning vid Umeå universitet, Umeå universitet, Enheten för polisutbildning vid Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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