Meet Sweden's most famous police officer, an Australian
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.
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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.
