Is the Swedish welfare state a social disaster permeated by crime?

The Swedish police force appears on our television screens, year in and year out. The socially critical police narratives in novels and films have a tremendous impact. But have the fictional police affected real-life public opinion and political decisions? This is one of the issues investigated by film studies scholar Michael Tapper in his thesis: "The cop in the twilight land: Swedish police narratives in novels and films 1965-2010". Aiming a magnifying glass at the bestsellers within the Swedish crime genre in both novels and films, Michael Tapper maps their development from Sjöwall-Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson. His work is a history of Swedish ideas and culture in the years from 1965 to 2010, dealing with the social debate, views on criminality, the role of the police and masculinity. Popular Swedish police films have persistently presented a TV picture of a Sweden in which the welfare state was rotten to the core and barely concealed a brutal class structure and rampant crime. "For years, criminologists have tried to give a more subtle image of violent crime and to tone down the threatening representations of an invading Eastern European mafia, but crime journalism, populist politicians of various ideological persuasions and crime literature thrive on an alarmist outlook.