Important addendum:
It is minor fraud as per Brottsbalk (1962:700) Chapter 9 paragraph 2 to use transportation with the expectation of cash payment without paying.

However SL can not make use for that law for a number of reasons including
A) They don't take cash anymore.
B) The burden of proof is very high as in order to apply they need to verify that someone hasn't paid for their ticket -after- they've already taken the ride -and- confirmed the person is not willing to pay the punitive fee. Essentially the person has to confess.

1) The subway police are stationed in the subway to handle the safety of the subway, they are not there to catch fare dodgers. They will however catch you if you jump right infront of them.

2) Riding with a false ticket is fraud, riding without a ticket is simply unauthorised access which is punishable by a fine (ordningsbot) not jail. This is regulated by Ordningslag (1993:1617) Chapter 4 paragraph 6.4 and 10.

Indeed the Riksdag could do it. It's just that convincing 175 people to change the law so that the police in a single city can crack down on mostly high school kids is not a very realistic proposition.

If you had a mind control device installed in the building you could do that and a host of other things (Changing the constitution would be a breeze!) but it's not something I see happening otherwise.

From a realistic perspective there's nothing SL or the City of Stockholm can do. SL can ask the Highway authority to raise the fines, but the Highway Authority will say no. They can ask the Riksdag to change the law, but the Riksdag will say no. They can ask the Police to deal with it, but the Police will say no. From the perspective of all these agencies and departments this is just a minor local issue and they have actual work to do.

The way it works is that you mail them the fine and pay 100 SEK (about 1/8th of the fine) and they pay the fine for you.

A much shorter version of my post would be this.

You know how people talk about how the US constitution was written to escape Tyranny right? The Swedish state of government was written for the same purpose but with an entirely different approach. After experiencing what government where the executive had absolute power was like, we designed a system where noone has absolute power. Everything has to be executed through the system which requires committees to agree on almost anything and we are -extremely- careful about handing out any kind of government authority.

Sweden operates on a different legal system then the US and England does which often confuses Slashdot posters.

When a government entity wants to do something it has two options, either it makes a department for it such as the police or firemen. Alternatively it can create a corporation with a CEO where the board of directors are the elected politicians.

A corporation is legally no different from any other corporation, the only difference is that the owner is the county or the state. A number of major Swedish corporations such as Vattenfall are owned by the state.

Furthermore a Swedish county (Komun) is an administrative body, not a legislative one. While they can create ordnances they have no legislative power to grant anyone police powers, that is something that has to be done by the parliament.

While we a few years ago introduced the system where public events have to pay for the police protection, that is not a system where the public event gets to hire the police, that is a system where the police arbitrarily decides how much protection the event needs and then sends them the bill. Their options are to not hold the event or pay the bill, they do not get to choose their level of protection.

The Swedish police does not ever guard common stores unless they are actively investigating crime (For instance lately they've been standing around goldsmiths as gold robberies have been on the rise for years), if a store wants active protection it has to pay guards which do not have much more legal authority then a common citizen (Largely they're legally allowed to physically evict you).

People commissioned by the Swedish government can't be fired (To protect them from political pressure) however they can be replaced. That is they get to continue with their current salary for the duration of their term while someone else gets to do their job. The cabinet only appoints the top level directors who are then supposed to be able to handle everything else. I'm not sure about the exact hierarchy of the police but I believe there's at-least 4-5 levels between the cabinet and Stockholm City Police not counting the various oversight boards.

The cabinet also has a very limited ability to control the priorities of their departments, this is the relevant bit of law
"No public authority, including the Riksdag and the decision-making bodies of local authorities, may determine how an administrative authority shall decide in a particular case relating to the exercise of public authority vis-Ã-vis a private subject or a local authority, or relating to the application of law."

Essentially while the Cabinet controls the budget of the department, makes the commisions as well as perform various executive decisions. They can't legally tell the department how to apply the law.

For example when it comes to Filesharing it is illegal but it's on near zero priority for the police because it's a non-jailable offence (Like not paying the ticket in the metro). If the justice minister told the police to prioritise that she would go to jail for constitutional crimes, her only option is to either get the Riksdag to change the law so it's a jailable offense or require the police to focus on non-jailable offences in general.

I'm confused to as why you think the laws of Belgium have any bearing on what is legal in Sweden.

It's hard to describe with words how deeply the core principles of the Swedish state would be violated by your proposal. You are essentially proposing breaking down the entire system of government.

SL (The owner of the metro) is a private corporation that is owned by the local county. Having a private company employ police in the capacity of policemen is unthinkable, it can simply not happen, ever. It violates every principle about division of power and oversight of power.

Yes, the Chief of Police has the authority to send all his police down in the metro to catch people dodging fares if he wanted to. But what sort of perverse mind control would you use on him to make him do such a thing and how many seconds do you think he would remain chief of police if he did so? Catching people dodging fares is not part of his mandate and by ordering the policemen to do so, he'd make them unable to actually prevent crime. That sort of thing would force the oversight board to remove him on the spot.

The way it works in Sweden is that when you receive an invoice (Such as the punitive fee from not having a ticket) you have 30 days to pay before it is considered a debt. At that point you still have some amount of time, iirc over a month before the debt becomes an unpaid debt that is recorded by the state to be collected.

The records of all these things are regulated by law and as generally applies to all databases that contain identifiable information the database is only allowed to be used for the its intended purpose, for instance using your debt database to send advertisements would be illegal.

Committing crimes in order to deal with freeriders is not a particularly good career move in Sweden.

Even if they catch them red-handed, the security guards only have the authority to evict them from the station, they don't have the authority to detain them.

Personally I used to jump the turnstiles when I was a kid partly because the free pass we got as high school students only worked daytime and the tickets are really expensive when you're that age and partly because it's fun jumping over them. It seems to me the only thing SL gained by upgrading to these new machines is that now the ordinary commuters get bothered.

The fine you get when you're caught dodging the fare is legally not a fine but a punitive ticket price(straffavgift). If you're caught by the police dodging the fare (Sometimes they stand around trying to catch criminals or illegal immigrants) then you get an actual fine (ordningsbot) which is actually not covered by planka.nu and can show up on your permanent record.

Essentially it's important to understand that Sweden makes an extremely clear distinction between those that have the authority to handle criminal matters and those who do not, the metro does not.

A simple parliamentary majority? Short of mind control powers you'll never get a Swedish parliament to give random uneducated bums police powers. The only non-police with police powers in Sweden are train conductors however the metro is not a train.

Meanwhile the actual police are really expensive and overworked as is due to budget issues and there are consitutional issues preventing the state from giving orders to the police.

The PM couldn't because that would be highly illegal. The way the Swedish goverment is set up the ministers are not allowed to make executive decisions, they are only allowed to make policy decisions that are then executed by the public servants.

You're also probably more correct then you are aware. Planka.nu as an organisation actually recieves state support as the Swedish state supports political organisations in general.

The police has absolutely zero reason to help catching fare dodgers.

To understand why so few fare dodgers get caught it's important to understand that the police has no business being in the metro unless they suspect a crime is going on. The only people in the metro are the metro guards who are explicitly -not- police.

This is important because in Sweden only the police can legally detain you which means that when a metro guard catches you without a ticket, you can simply run out of the metro and the guard can't actually legally stop you.