At this juncture the political demonstrations during the second half of the sixties had opened up magnificent possibilities. Demonstrators pleading for peace had been suppressed by violence. Hardly ever armed with anything but their banners and their convictions, they had been met by tear gas, water cannons, and rubber nightsticks. Few were the nonviolent demonstrations that had not ended in tumult and chaos. Those individuals who had tried to defend themselves had been mauled about, arrested, and prosecuted for “assaulting the police” or “resisting arrest.” All this information had been fed into the statistics. The method had worked perfectly. Each time a few hundred policemen were sent out to “control” a demonstration, the figures for alleged assaults against the police had rocketed.
The uniformed police had been encouraged “not to pull their punches,” as the expression went, orders with which many a patrolman had been only too delighted, in all possible situations, to comply. Tap a drunk with a nightstick and the chances of his hitting back are always fairly high.
A simple lesson, which anyone could learn.
These tactics had worked. Now the Swedish police were armed to the teeth. All of a sudden, situations that formerly could have been cleared up by a single man with equipped with a lead pencil and a pinch of common sense required a busload of patrolmen equipped with automatics and bullet-proof vests.
The long-term result, however, was something no one had quite foreseen. Violence breeds not only antipathy and hatred but also insecurity and fear.
-from The Locked Room, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (translated by Paul Britten Austin)
