As governor of Norway’s northernmost territory, Odd Olsen Ingero commands a police force with just six officers and a single detention cell for an area twice the size of New Jersey. Even that is overkill: Nobody has been locked up here in the capital of Svalbard since last summer. And that was for just two days. It is not just that there are not many people — fewer than 3,000 are officially registered as residents — or that what are elsewhere run-of-the-mill crimes like car theft are an exotic and very risky business in a place where there are no roads out of town to escape on. The key to Svalbard’s status as probably Europe’s closest thing to a crime-free society, according to the governor, is that unemployment is in effect illegal. “If you don’t have a job, you can’t live here,” Ingero said, noting that the jobless are swiftly deported. Retirees are sent away, too, unless they can prove they have sufficient means to support themselves. Although governed by Norway, a country that prides itself on offering cradle-to-grave state support for its needy citizens, Svalbard, an archipelago of islands in the high Arctic, embraces a model that is closer to the vision of Ayn Rand than the Scandinavian norm of generous welfare protection. Even Longyearbyen’s socialist mayor, Christin Kristoffersen, a member of the Labour Party, wants the town — named after an American industrialist, John Munro Longyear, who founded it in 1906 — to stay off limits to all but the able-bodied and gainfully employed. “This is a very special kind of place,” said the mayor, whose town has all the conveniences of a modern urban area, including an airport, high-speed Internet and even a high-end restaurant, but faces such a struggle to survive against the elements that it has no place for the jobless or infirm. Homelessness, like unemployment, is banned. All residents must have a fixed address, a rule that ensures that nobody freezes to death in a place that is closer to the North Pole than to the Norwegian capital, Oslo, and where snowfall continues deep into summer. The government funds a school and a hospital, as well as the governor’s administration, and also subsidises Svalbard’s biggest employer, a loss-making state-owned coal company. But it shuns the leftist, levelling consensus that, according to conservative critics, has made working almost a lifestyle choice in the rest of Norway. Taxes are much lower than elsewhere in the country. “There is no welfare system in Svalbard,” Ingero said. “If you are unable to support yourself with work, you cannot stay here.” The result, he added, “is a very quiet and law-abiding society.” He’s not advocating the Svalbard approach as a solution to crime elsewhere, but he does think it shows a clear link between unemployment and lawlessness. It also debunks a view held by surging populist parties across Europe, including Norway, that immigration is largely to blame for rising crime. Svalbard has no restrictions on foreigners who want to move here, except that they must have a job. Under a 1920 international treaty that granted Norway sovereignty, the territory is open to all nationals of the more than 40 nations. A population that used to be homogeneously white now includes Thais, Chinese and others. Nearly a third of all residents are foreigners, including hundreds of Ukrainians working in a mining concession owned by Russia. “The demographics here are rather unique,” said Ingero, who spent most of his career fighting crime as a senior police official on the Norwegian mainland, and now presides over a place so placid that residents regularly leave their car and snowmobile keys in the ignition. That is not entirely true. According to official statistics, Svalbard was gripped last year by a dramatic crime wave, with reported cases that involved violence soaring by 800 per cent. But that was due mostly to bar brawls that raised the number of violent cases investigated by police from just one in 2012 to nine in 2013. The most serious incident last year involved a drunken Ukrainian miner arrested for a knifing in Barentsburg, a grim Russian-owned mining settlement down the coast. The police handle around 100 cases a year, most of which involve minor infractions like reckless driving and shoplifting. There have been no serious crimes reported so far this year, although the authorities are worried about a spate of littering involving scientists who, during research in the wilderness, failed to clean up their garbage. Eirik Palm, editor of the Norwegian-language local newspaper, Svalbardposten, said he could not remember when he last ran a major crime story. “I think someone stole alcohol from a bar once,” he said. “But we have other stories like people falling into glaciers or getting attacked by polar bears.” Mark Sabbatini, an American who edits “the world’s northernmost alternative newspaper”, a weekly called Icepeople, said he doesn’t worry much about bears and even less about thieves. “I used to be a crime reporter in Los Angeles,” he said. “I can’t say I enjoyed it.” But he acknowledged that living in such a remote place brings its own stresses. “If you want to live here, there is something slightly warped about you,” he said.
