The result, he added, “is a very quiet and law-abiding society.” He’s 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 Mr. 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 don’t 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. But that was due mostly to bar brawls that raised the number of violent cases investigated by police from just one in 2012 to nine in 2013.

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 around 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.