As governor of Norway’s northernmost territory, Odd Olsen Ingero commands a police force with just six officers and a single detention cell for an area twice the size of the US’ New Jersey. Even that is overkill: Nobody has been locked up here in the capital of Svalbard since last summer. And that was for just two days.
It is not just that there are not many people — fewer than 3,000 are officially registered as residents — or that what are elsewhere run-of-the-mill crimes like car theft are an exotic and very risky business in a place where there are no roads out of town to escape on.
The key to Svalbard’s status as probably Europe’s closest thing to a crime-free society, according to the governor, is that unemployment is in effect illegal.
“If you don’t have a job, you can’t live here,” Ingero said, noting that the jobless are swiftly deported.
Retirees are sent away, too, unless they can prove they have sufficient means to support themselves.
Although governed by Norway, a country that prides itself on offering cradle-to-grave state support for its needy citizens, Svalbard, an archipelago of islands in the high Arctic, embraces a model that is closer to the vision of Ayn Rand than the Scandinavian norm of generous welfare protection.
Even socialist Longyearbyen Mayor Christin Kristoffersen, a member of the Labour Party, wants the town — named after a US industrialist, John Munro Longyear, who founded it in 1906 — to stay off limits to all but the able-bodied and gainfully employed.
“This is a very special kind of place,” said the mayor, whose town has all the conveniences of a modern urban area, including an airport, high-speed Internet and even a high-end restaurant, but faces such a struggle to survive against the elements that it has no place for the jobless or infirm.
Homelessness, like unemployment, is banned. All residents must have a fixed address, a rule that ensures that nobody freezes to death in a place that is closer to the North Pole than to the Norwegian capital, Oslo, and where snowfall continues deep into summer.
The government does fund a school and a hospital, as well as the governor’s administration, and also subsidizes Svalbard’s biggest employer, a loss-making state-owned coal company. However, it shuns the leftist, leveling consensus that according to conservative critics has made working almost a lifestyle choice in the rest of Norway. Taxes are much lower than elsewhere in the country.
“There is no welfare system in Svalbard,” Ingero said. “If you are unable to support yourself with work, you cannot stay here.”
The result, he added, “is a very quiet and law-abiding society.”
He is not advocating the Svalbard approach as a solution to crime elsewhere, but he does think it shows a clear link between unemployment and lawlessness. At the same time, it also debunks a view held by surging populist parties across Europe, including Norway, that immigration is largely to blame for rising crime.
Svalbard has no restrictions on foreigners who want to move here, except that they must have a job. Under a 1920 international treaty that granted Norway sovereignty, the territory is open to all nationals of the more than 40 nations that have now signed the pact.
A population that used to be homogeneously white now includes Thais, Chinese and other foreigners. Nearly a third of all residents are foreigners, including hundreds of Ukrainians working in a mining concession owned by Russia.
“The demographics here are rather unique,” said Ingero, who spent most of his previous career fighting crime as a senior police official on the Norwegian mainland, and now presides over a place so placid that residents regularly leave their car and snowmobile keys in the ignition and often do not bother locking their front doors.
Mark Sabbatini, an American who edits “the world’s northernmost alternative newspaper,” an English-language weekly called Icepeople, said he often leaves his computer untended in a coffee shop but never worries it might get stolen. “There is no crime,” he said.
That is not entirely true. According to official statistics, Svalbard was gripped last year by a dramatic crime wave, with reported cases that involved violence soaring by 800 percent. However, that was due mostly to bar brawls that raised the number of violent cases investigated by police from just one in 2012 to nine last year.
The most serious incident last year involved a drunken Ukrainian miner arrested for a knifing in Barentsburg, a grim Russian-owned mining settlement down the coast. Moved to Longyearbyen, he spent a couple of days in the governor’s holding cell ahead of his trial on the Norwegian mainland.
In total, the police handle about 100 cases a year, most of which involve minor infractions like reckless driving on snowmobiles and shoplifting. There have been no serious crimes reported so far this year, although the authorities are worried about a spate of littering involving untidy scientists who, during research in the wilderness, failed to clean up their garbage.
Svalbard has featured in a James Bond movie, Die Another Day, and in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but is so bereft of real human villainy that polar bears have taken on the role as the main troublemakers. This is barren ground for Nordic noir, the Scandinavian genre of crime writing.
Eirik Palm, editor of the Norwegian-language local newspaper, Svalbardposten, said he could not remember when he last ran a major crime story.
“I think someone stole alcohol from a bar once,” he said, flicking through back issues of his newspaper. “But we have other stories like people falling into glaciers or getting attacked by polar bears.”
Polar bears feature regularly on the front page in connection with attacks, along with melting glaciers and scientific research projects.
At an inquest in London two weeks ago about a student at Eton who was mauled to death near Longyearbyen in 2011, survivors of the school trip told of a horrific nighttime attack by a starving bear.
Gun ownership is widespread, not because anyone worries about fending off a mugger or a knife-wielding coal miner, but because polar bears present a real danger. The police enforce a rule that anybody moving outside the city limits of Longyearbyen must carry a weapon and know how to use it. The British school group had a rifle, but the weapon, fitted with an elaborate safety system, failed to fire.
Another hot recent topic, aside from a fault in an undersea cable that left Svalbard without telephone and Internet service for a few hours, is the extortionate price of fresh food. Svalbardposten, for example, uncovered what it called the world’s most expensive milk.
While alcohol and cigarettes, free of many of the high taxes levied in the rest of Norway, are relatively cheap, a liter carton of milk in a local shop can cost the equivalent of nearly US$7.
Sabbatini said he does not worry much about bears and even less about thieves and muggers.
“I used to be a crime reporter in Los Angeles,” he said. “I can’t say I enjoyed it.”
However, he acknowledged that living in such a remote place shrouded in near total darkness for half the year brings its own stresses.
“If you want to live here, there is something slightly warped about you,” he said.
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