Swedish police still stop people on a gut feeling

In Sweden’s border areas, officers may select a person for a check without an individual concrete trigger; observation, profiling, a tip or what police call a “gut feeling” can be enough. Our analysis examines who bears the risk when intuition becomes a public power.

Current police guidance confirms that selective internal immigration checks in border-near areas need not rest on a founded or special reason. Each check must be justified, but its basis need not be individual or concrete. Police list observations, intelligence, risk profiles and tips as permitted grounds. The authority’s own magazine called this “gut feeling”.

The power is expanding in use. The Police Authority’s 2025 report records 51,894 internal immigration checks, up 37 percent in a year. Border-near checks rose by 65 percent.

Brå found the safeguard around that discretion uneven. Its profiling study said officers lacked practical guidance on profiling and equal treatment. In field observations, all of Brå’s criteria were met in about three quarters of checks. Its drug data also found systematically higher shares of unconfirmed possession suspicions among people with African or Southwest Asian backgrounds than among Nordic-background suspects.

Those figures do not prove bias in every stop, and deployment patterns can affect outcomes. A 2026 review quoted Civil Rights Defenders’ Aida Samani saying the report had not yet systematically shaped police work. When the initial reason can be subjective, fairness depends on written grounds, explanations to the person stopped and scrutiny of which checks repeatedly find nothing.

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