Public crime prevention in Malmö

Abstract

This paper explores the appearance of post-politics—the absence of discursive public debate and the policing of consensus—that have arisen in conjunction with Malmö’s implementation of two Public Health initiatives against crime. Against current accounts of crime policy as “Nordic Exceptionalism” and “Nordic Punitiveness,” which explore the sources of crime policy within nationalist frameworks, this work claims that anti-democratic/political discourses co-appear with knowledges that espouse informal/formal social control-based interventions. Inspired by the work of Dewey, Arendt and Ranciére, the paper employs a genealogy of appearance to make sense of these developments. Using publicly accessible data, the paper analyses how the public appears to itself through the proposals and determinations of ‘public concern’ about preventing crime and, through this lens, explores the paradoxes and stratification of knowledge-usage in one case of local crime prevention in Sweden.