More than ten years have passed since the Swedish “Roma register” was discovered. In the autumn of 2013, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter found a list with the title “Travelling people” in the police’s database. It became clear that the police in the region Scania, in the south of Sweden, had registered the names of over 4000 Roma people all over the country. The register probably existed since two years before it was discovered. There were both adults and children, and both people who had committed crimes and people who had not. 220 of the people in the register were dead, and the police have not provided any explanation as to why they were part of the register. What they all had in common was that they were from Roma families. 

This led to the police going under investigation by the discrimination ombudsman of Sweden, since the police are not allowed to store information about people solely based on their ethnic background, according to the Discrimination Law (diskrimineringslagen). In the register, one could also see who was related and in what way. According to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, everyone has the right to privacy regarding their life and family life. The Swedish police based the Roma register on family connections. In that sense, the register could be seen as a violation of both Swedish and European Union laws. 

The registration and control of Roma communities has been occurring in Sweden in the past. On May 31, 1943, the Swedish police went to Roma settlements all over the country at the request of the Swedish Social Services office which was in the process of conducting a racial biological study of the Roma population. The police officers asked people to fill out a form with personal data, ethnic background and religion. These types of practices have been proven to live on in the way the police structure their work. The former police officer Jeanette Larsson tells Dagens Nyheter about her experiences from the Scanian police in the 1990s. She claims that Roma suspects’ personal information was sorted into a separate box marked with a “Z” for “zigenare”, which in Swedish is used in the same way as the word “Gypsies”. Hence, the Swedish police’s willingness to keep control over the Roma population did not appear for the first time in 2013. 

Racial profiling, or ethnic profiling as it is commonly called in Europe, is assuming that somebody is a criminal based solely on their ethnicity. When the Swedish discrimination ombudsman investigated the Scanian police, they concluded that the occurrence of ethnic profiling could not be dismissed. The police’s explanation for the register was that they originally created it because of a conflict in 2011 between some Roma families in the city of Staffanstorp, Scania. Even though this might be true, it does not explain the large number of Roma people on the list who live in other parts of Sweden, and have no affiliation with the people involved in the conflict. 

The criminologist Leandro Schclarek Mulinari argues that one of the main consequences of ethnic profiling is the feeling of inferiority it creates for the person exposed to it. Ethnic profiling makes certain groups of society lose trust in the state they live in and the police force they are dependent on. Hence, Schclarek Mulinari claims that ethnic profiling can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who are expected by their society to commit crime becomes more likely to do so. 

Ethnic profiling has been largely debated in the USA, often in the context of how the police are treating the African-American population. In the last decade, the Black Lives Matter movement has shed light on how the actions of the USA police are targeting the African-American community by using excessive violence and having more suspicion towards African-American people than towards whites. Although the issue has not been as noticed in Europe, it is happening here as well. 

In 2011, The European Court of Human Rights used the term “ethnic profiling” for the first time. The case was called Lingurar v. Romania and it concerned the Romanian police force that had executed a raid on a Roma household. In the judgement, it was stated that the police had “automatically connected ethnicity to criminal behaviour”. 

In Sweden, the reactions of the Roma register were big. None of the people in the register were aware that they were part of it until the information was revealed in 2013. Many people whose names were on the list protested and expressed their feelings about it in the media. Eleven people from the list made contact with the organisation Civil Rights Defenders. Together, they decided to sue the state, and they got the equivalent of 2700 euros each from the process. 

Even though some of the people on the list got compensation in the form of money, the damages of the Roma register are difficult to set right. One of the conditions for a healthy and functioning democratic society is mutual trust between citizens and their authorities. However, this trust can be broken, and if it is, compensation in the form of money is not an obvious way to repair it again.