Safe City Action
Stockholm and Nordic Safe Cities have taken action on the four themes of the Capital Code: Reduce online hate and fear; Empower citizens to resist disinformation; Empower youth to promote inclusion; Build and expand local safe city alliances.
City Portrait
Spread across an archipelago of fourteen islands, Stockholm is the capital and most populous city in Sweden with 962.154 inhabitants. Stockholm is ambitious in its goal to become a modern city that offers each inhabitant the same opportunities, and the same freedom to choose. The city continuously ranks among some of the most sustainable, smart and innovative cities in the world. Stockholm strives to be a resilient, tolerant, and inclusive city where all its inhabitants can experience freedom and safety. This mindset also carries over to the city’s work against violent extremism through both a preventative and holistic methodology.
Safe City Challenges
All three milieus of violent extremism, far-right, far-left and radical Islamic extremism, are present in the city of Stockholm, which demands a broad and flexible approach by the city and its operations. Though there has been a particular surge of far-right extremism in the last few years that requires further attention. Additional challenges lay in detecting and preventing extremist threats from lone perpetrators. To counter these challenges, Stockholm takes the approach that preventive measures should be broad and carried out at an early stage through the city’s schools and social services
Strategy
The city-wide guidelines make it clear that all the measures to counter violent extremism should be carried out through the basis of a preventive holistic approach. Through an early intervention (for example home visits to new parents, raising awareness in preschool and cooperation’s between social services and schools) the City of Stockholm aims to counteract milieus of violent extremism and provide actions that are based on situational and individual conditions. The City of Stockholm is also motivating individuals to exit violent extremist milieus, for example by providing community intervention teams and city-wide exit activities.
As a complement to the city-wide guidelines, all of Stockholm’s 13 city districts and five of its Specialist Departments have an individual action plan that contains a situational description regarding challenges, such as trends and crime statistics. Every plan also contains measures to counter these challenges.
Focus Areas
The City of Stockholm currently focuses on the following:
1. A holistic approach that incorporates the prevention of extremism in the city’s general preventive operations – with basis on individuals’ situations and conditions.
2. Raising awareness and competence among the city’s employees in how to combat violent extremism.
3. Developing new and adapting old methods for preventive work through close cooperation with other agencies on a local as well as a national level.