ran as follows:
On the afternoon of Saturday the 14th of this month, I was on the sidewalk outside the entrance to number 15 Pontonjärgatan together with my five-year-old daughter.
We were waiting for my wife, who was visiting an invalid in the building. To pass the time, we were playing tag on the sidewalk. There was no one on the street as far as I can remember. It was, as I said, a Saturday afternoon and the stores were closed. Consequently I have no witnesses to what occurred.
I had tagged my daughter, lifted her up in the air and had just put her down on the sidewalk when I discovered that a police car had stopped at the curb. Two patrolmen got out of the car and came up to me. One of them immediately grabbed my arm and said, “What are you doing to the kid, you son of a bitch?” (To be fair, I should add that I was casually dressed in khaki pants, windbreaker and a cap, all of it clean and fairly new to be sure, but I may nevertheless have looked shabby to the patrolman in question.) I was too astonished to say anything right away. The other patrolman took my daughter by the hand and told her to go find her mother. I explained that I was her father. One of the patrolmen then twisted my arm behind my back, which was extremely painful, and shoved me into the back seat of the patrol car. On the way to the station, one of them hit me with his fist in the chest, side and stomach, all the time calling me names like “child molester” and “dirty old bastard” and so forth.
Once at the station, they locked me in a cell. A while later the door opened and Chief Inspector Stig Nyman (I didn’t know who it was at the time, but found out later) came into the cell.“Are you the guy who chases little girls? I’ll take that out of you,” he said, and hit me so hard in the stomach that I doubled up. As soon as I’d caught my breath I told him I was the girl’s father and he kneed me in the groin. He continued to beat me until someone came and told him my wife and daughter were there. As soon as the Chief Inspector understood that I had been telling the truth, he told me to go, without apologizing or in any way attempting to explain his behavior.
I wish hereby to draw your attention to the events described and to request that Chief Inspector Nyman and the two patrolmen be held to account for this mistreatment of a completely innocent citizen.
Sture Magnusson, engineer
OFFICIAL REMARKS:
Chief Inspector Nyman has no recollection of the complainant. Patrolmen Ström and Rosenkvist claim to have apprehended the complainant on the grounds that he acted oddly and threatened the child. They applied no more force than was required to move Magnusson into and out of the car. None of the five patrolmen who were in the precinct station at the time admits to having witnessed any mistreatment of the complainant. Nor did any of them notice that Chief Inspector Nyman entered the detention cell and believe they can say he did not. No action.
Rönn put the paper to one side, made a note in his notebook and went on to the next complaint.
The Justice Department Ombudsman
Stockholm
Last Friday, October 18th, I attended a party at the home of a good friend on Ostermalmsgatan. At about ten o’clock
P.M.
another friend of mine and I called a taxi and left the party to go to my apartment. We were standing in the entranceway, waiting for the taxi, when two policemen came walking down the other side of the street. They crossed the street and came up to us and asked us if we lived in the building. We answered that we did not. “Then move along, don’t hang around here,” they said. We said that we were waiting for a taxi and stayed where we were. The policemen then grabbed hold of us rather brusquely and pushed us out of the entranceway and told us to keep moving. But we wanted the taxi we’d ordered, and said so. The two patrolmen first tried to force us to move on by pushing us in front ofthem, and when we protested, one of them
Terra Wolf, Mercy May
Jennifer Collins Johnson
Louise Penny
Tamara Hogan
Mary Hanson
Roderick Gordon
Aimee Agresti
Dean Murray
Amy Malone
Katharine Davis