Meet Sweden's most famous police officer, an Australian

Updated

Sixteen years ago, Scott Goodwin was a police officer in Sydney before he packed up and moved to a small Swedish city that was struggling with attitudes toward immigration, drugs and youth crime. Since then, he's become a minor celebrity in Sweden, but not without making a few enemies.

Law enforcement is in Scott Goodwin's blood.

The Australian father of three comes from several generations of emergency service workers — his older brother is a police sergeant in Lithgow, 140 kilometres west of Sydney and where Goodwin grew up, and his younger brother is a paramedic.

His father, grandfather and various uncles and cousins have all followed the same route. Goodwin himself first joined the New South Wales police force in 1996 after a short stint in the Navy when he finished school.

"If you count up all the years' service in my family, from my grandfather down to my younger brother and cousins, it's up over I think 360 years' service in police and ambulance," he says.

But for the last 13, he's built a reputation for himself in a country 14,000 kilometres away, on the other side of the world: Sweden.

Goodwin, 45, is a police officer in Växjö in Sweden's south, where he lives with Swedish wife Jessica, sons Lucas and Liam, daughter Madeleine and golden retriever Bosse.

He's spent a large part of his time in Växjö working in Araby, a neighbourhood with high unemployment in the city's north. It was listed as one of 15 areas around the country "particularly vulnerable" to high poverty rates and crime in a 2015 Swedish police report.

Right-wing media have pounced on such reports, blaming Sweden's high intake of refugees and branding the areas "no-go zones" — a military term with racist undertones designed to suggest a breakdown in civil order. But Goodwin brushes off the claim.

"A lot of the international media call Araby a police 'no-go zone', which is pretty much a wrong way to describe the area because I've been working in this area for about 10 years and it's never been a no-go zone," he says.

Anti-refugee sentiment in Växjö has festered in recent years over a widely perceived link between immigration and a rise in violent crime, something no shortage of experts and even the Swedish government have refuted.

Around town, Goodwin is a recognisable face. Council workers greet him warmly by first name and students at a local school call out jovially across the entrance hall when he comes to visit. A worker at a factory on the outskirts of town breaks into a grin when he winds down his car window to ask for directions.

In a park in Araby, not a few minutes' drive away, it's a different story. Passers-by peer suspiciously into Goodwin's tinted windows as he sweeps the neighbourhood park.

"Police cars are not exactly welcome in this area."

In 2012, Goodwin was named Citizen of the Year in Kronoberg county in recognition of his efforts in raising the profile of police work on social media, an award for which he is quick to point out the founder of furniture giant IKEA was also nominated.

"I'm in the same league," he laughs. "Little Scott from Lithgow."

Although Goodwin and his family return to Australia to visit relatives every few years, he says he catches himself feeling like an outsider in the country where he grew up.

"I don't miss Australia anymore. I don't feel that longing that I felt before. I see myself pretty much as a Swede."

But his new life hasn't come easy. After taking leave from the NSW force in his late twenties and moving to Sweden with Jessica, who runs a large hospitality business in town and whom he married in 2008, Goodwin spent several years learning Swedish, a language he knew he would need to speak if he were ever to find work as a police officer.

"The first year was like a holiday, but I knew if I wanted to stay here I'd have to learn the language," he says.

He now speaks it fluently, albeit with an accent.

Goodwin's immersion has meant he's begun to forget some of his mother tongue. Throughout our interview, he hesitates on words that momentarily escape him — "what's that word again in English?". With Jessica, he confesses he speaks "Swedlish".

Beyond that, Goodwin has seen a lot in his career with the Swedish police, completing stints with Interpol in Stockholm and the FBI in the United States, travelling to Finland, London and even Sydney to observe security exercises, to Madrid, Budapest and Paris as a Swedish representative to various conferences, and to Switzerland to be briefed by the World Health Organisation on swine flu.

His current job is as kommunpolis, a role he describes as part crime prevention, part community liaison around Växjö.

But for young people in Växjö like Aila Sandström, 18, a final-year student at a local high school, Goodwin is known for something else. "Everybody knows Scott," she says.

Goodwin reached national fame in 2011 when, on the suggestion of a friend, he began to post updates on the Växjö police Facebook account. Aimed at a younger audience and covering topics from domestic violence to alcohol abuse and personal safety, the posts at first reached a small, bemused audience, but they were soon regularly attracting viral attention.

One post in 2012 offering advice for teenagers drinking in public was liked 52,000 times: "If you're 16 years old, drunk and holding a bottle full of booze, it's not very smart to scream 'f&#k the police' when we walk by. If you're gonna do it anyway make sure you can at least run pretty fast!!"

Media outlets quickly dubbed him "Facebookpolisen" — the Facebook policeman — and it was not long before Goodwin was making regular appearances on morning television and in Stockholm newspapers.

"Every time I posted something the major newspapers called to say 'explain why you did that'," Goodwin says. "I miss it."

He even published a popular book on the topic after a fan with a friend in the publishing industry contacted him to float the idea.

"He was funny, he talked about serious stuff that needed to be talked about," says another school student, 16-year-old Thuuva Isaksson.

"He had a way to talk to teenagers specifically, because usually when it's a person of authority, teenagers might feel stupid."

The Facebook posts continued for three years until 2014, and while they were met positively by many, a small number of detractors hit back. In a short period of time, Goodwin was the subject of eight formal complaints to the Swedish justice ombudsman. Eventually, police headquarters in Stockholm stepped in.

"It's sad to say that higher ranking police chiefs didn't support him, and didn't like what he was writing about," says Växjö chief superintendent Tomas Hermander.

"His language was too much for them. The youth liked [the posts] and most of our other police officers thought it was very good. But they stopped him."

"This was something new for the Swedish police — an officer who wrote in a very humorous way about some incidents that he had been to, and he was very free-spoken. It's a good medium for police to show what's happened and to explain why we do this and why we do that."

Goodwin hasn't posted on Facebook in three years and admits he doesn't have a personal account.

"It was something where it was too much time, too much attention. It was a relief when it stopped."

But the platform allowed him to broach difficult topics like domestic violence — an unseen scourge he witnessed during his time as a police officer in Australia.

"When I worked as a police officer in Sydney, domestic violence was a very big problem. Then I come to Sweden and it's just as big, and it's a crime that nobody talks about."

These days Goodwin still works long hours ("I don't like leaving things half-finished"), but no longer travels so much for work. Instead he wants to focus on Växjö, which he calls home.

"I've got a name for myself here as 'Oh, that's the Australian police officer that came here'," he says.

Between his kommunpolis duties, teaching occasionally at the local police academy, and studying for a degree in counter-terrorism, he isn't left with much time to relax.

Even so, he still likes to sit down to watch his favourite crime show — Wallander (the Swedish version of course).

Topics: police, immigration, crime-prevention, sweden

First posted