Stockholm special-needs school broke gang recruitment pipeline, authorities now scrambling to copy model

• Criminal gangs targeted students with intellectual disabilities at Polhem adapted upper-secondary school during Stockholm's peak shooting wave
• Rector Susanne Avander built a tripartite model with police and social services that curtailed recruitment on school grounds
• Authorities now want to replicate the model at other schools across Stockholm
• Sweden's adapted schools serve precisely the vulnerable population gangs systematically exploit for low-level violent tasks

During Stockholm's worst period of gang shootings two years ago, criminal networks made direct contact with students at Polhems anpassade gymnasieskola — an adapted upper-secondary school for pupils with intellectual disabilities on Kungsholmen — offering them violent errands. The school's rector, Susanne Avander, responded by forging a deep collaboration between the school, social services, and police, a model that Sveriges Radio reports authorities now want to spread to other schools.

"We would never have reached where we are today without cooperation, without the efforts that police and social services have made," Avander told Ekot.

The targeting of Polhem's students was not random. Sweden's adapted upper-secondary schools — anpassad gymnasieskola, formerly known as gymnasiesärskolan — serve young people with intellectual disabilities, a population that gang researchers have identified as particularly vulnerable to recruitment. The logic from the gangs' perspective is coldly rational: these students can be manipulated more easily, are less likely to understand the legal consequences of what they are asked to do, and are often socially isolated enough to find the attention flattering. They are recruited not as members but as disposable tools — asked to deliver packages, hold weapons, or carry out acts of violence that higher-ranking gang members want to keep at arm's length.

What made the Polhem model work was not any single intervention but the fact that three institutions — school, police, and social services — began sharing information and coordinating responses in real time rather than operating in their customary silos. Swedish schools, social services, and police all have legal mandates touching the same young people, but confidentiality rules and institutional culture have historically kept them apart. A school might suspect a student is being recruited without telling police; social services might have a file on a family without the school knowing. The Polhem collaboration broke through those barriers.

The results, according to Avander, have been tangible. But the more revealing question is why this approach was not standard practice before gangs started handing violent assignments to teenagers with cognitive disabilities. Stockholm has roughly 30 adapted upper-secondary programs. The city's regular schools face gang pressure too, but adapted schools present a softer target — and the students who attend them have fewer resources to protect themselves. The tripartite model Polhem built is not conceptually complex. It required willingness, not invention.

Authorities now say they want to replicate the model elsewhere. The timeline for that replication has not been specified. Sweden's school system is run by 290 municipalities, each with its own social services apparatus and its own interpretation of how much information can be shared with police. Scaling a model that depends on trust between three institutions is a different challenge from building it once in a single school with a determined rector.

Polhem's adapted gymnasium sits on Kungsholmen, one of Stockholm's more affluent islands, a fifteen-minute walk from City Hall. The gangs that recruited its students did not need to travel far.

Källor: Sveriges Radio Ekot