The Yale Globalist - Norrebro, Now 'No-Go'

Norrebro, Now 'No-Go'

Monday, 11 May 2009 | My Khanh Ngo

A street in the Nørrebro district, formerly a clubbing hotspot, now empties at night (Flickr).

As he had many Wednesday nights before, Andreas Hansen, a longtime resident of the Nørrebro district, walked his bike down the familiar street of Jægersborggade, looking for a bite to eat. The further he progressed, the quieter the street grew. Shadows lay where candlelit and crowded cafés once stood. A couple stumbled out of what seemed to be the only open bar as it joined the others in closing. Hansen looked at his watch, bewildered to find it only half past eight, and sighed, conceding, “I guess people are afraid of being out.”

Since the end of 2008, when a turf war broke out between biker gangs and the immigrant — predominantly Muslim — gangs of the neighborhood, many Copenhagen residents have avoided Nørrebro.

Danes now avoid streets through which they used to stroll without thought, and even the U.S. Embassy and British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, among other embassies, have sent e-mail notices warning their citizens to avoid what used to be a traditional center of nightlife.

Fears hit a peak after three shootings on March 9 resulted in two deaths, bringing a total of 30 shootings since last September: not much by other countries’ standards, but enough to spread alarm in the small country of Denmark, where, to the chagrin of some officials and police, the media has painted a picture of a sensationalized ethnic war between the Nørrebro gangs. Such coverage has heightened tensions in daily life as well as increased scrutiny of the country’s approach towards integration of its Muslim immigrants.

Unlike Before

“I am not too worried, but my neighbors have definitely been calling for more police,” said Hansen. “What’s ridiculous is that people who aren’t even living in Copenhagen are feeling more afraid.” No shootings have occurred outside the city’s limits.

A March 10 Gallup poll revealed that 60 percent of respondents from Copenhagen confirmed there are now certain “no-go” areas they refuse to enter, and half of all female respondents said they have changed their normal routine as a result of the gang warfare. Sabina Grith Andersen, a student at the Business School of Copenhagen, says that all her friends half-joke about avoiding Nørrebro when making plans to go out. It’s not that big a deal, she said, but added, “You do have to be careful, you know.”

Even in passing conversation, if one mentions she has been to Nørrebro, it is now common for Danes to jokingly respond: “And you didn’t get shot?”

Contrary to popular belief among citizens, the Danish National Police (DNP) has been monitoring gang activity for a long time because gangs have historically dominated organized crime in Denmark. But since the fresh outbreak of gang activity last year, inter-departmental collaboration has increased, particularly across different regions with district police. The DNP has been caught between maintaining a low profile about its tactics and keeping the public informed about its progress. Department regulations maintain that only official statements from the public relations office may be released to journalists, which is why a member of the DNP asked to remain anonymous when interviewed. “The police have a responsibility to protect from crimes, and so they feel they will be considered to ‘fail’ if there are many shootings,” he said. “There’s a pressure to combat what’s going on.”

Flemming Steen Munch, the head of information at Copenhagen Police, has maintained that citizens have nothing to fear. At the same time, Minister of Justice Brian Mikkelsen and Minister of Taxation Kristian Jensen have employed the gang-busting “Al Capone” model in response to the shootings. In February, law enforcement, social welfare, and tax officials began creating a “crime busters” unit to investigate gang members for tax evasion and other forms of economic criminality, much as the FBI did in the United States during the 1930s. At a press conference, Jensen warned that the “people that the police are using a lot of their resources on [to monitor] right now will be targeted [by the unit] … and their family members too.”

Many policemen and government officials blame the recent fighting on the crackdown on the Freetown of Christiana, a partially self-governed neighborhood in Copenhagen where the nation’s drug market used to be concentrated. Until 2004, authorities had tolerated open cannabis trade in this small, independent community. Now that the drugs have spread throughout the country, there is even some

political support for legalizing soft drugs to reduce the monetary incentive in the business. Regardless of its origin, the war is centered in Nørrebro, Copenhagen’s most ethnically diverse district (often referred to as “Little Arabia”), making the conflict easy to color.

Race Rhetoric

“The problem is that some people involved in the conflict use [race] as an excuse, saying that they are fighting for ‘honor,’” said a member of the DNP, speaking under anonymity. “Some big gang members would like to make it a more racial issue, so they’re using the media,” he elaborated, referring to those who have released statements to the press and online. “Some people in the immigrant gangs say they’re discriminated [against]. … They like to play those racial cards to justify their actions and get more supporters.”

Manu Sareen, leader of the Social Liberal Party delegation on the City Council and an integration consultant for the government, said, “Danish society now has the ‘good criminals’ and the ‘bad criminals.’ The good ones are the Hells Angels and the [ethnic] Danish gangs, and the bad ones now are the minorities.” Sareen’s comment illuminates the media’s role in shaping the conversation: By grouping all the gangs together under the collective term of “immigrant gangs” rather than using specific gang names, the media racializes the public debate.

Tactics racializing the gang violence have resulted in public backlash against Muslim immigrants. A Zapera poll published in a Danish newspaper, Metro Express, reported that 74 percent of the electorate believes that immigrant groups are “primarily responsible” for the gang war. Kirsten Hviid, a social researcher from Aalbord University, offered one possible explanation: “Hells Angels members are extremely recognizable, but nobody knows what immigrant gang members look like. … Consequently, all youths with dark skin and a certain type of clothing are seen as potential gang members.”

Some citizens, however, see a simpler direct relationship between crime and immigrants. John Heuser, resident of Ballerup, a town half an hour outside of Copenhagen, openly expressed his suspicions. “It used to be a lot safer,” he said. “But now, it’s our open borders that are the problem. … There are so many bad people coming in, going into our houses.”

These popular sentiments have quickly led to changes in political rhetoric. Liberal Party politicians have started calling for the age of criminal responsibility to be lowered, pointing to reports that say that immigrant gang members use siblings under the age of 15 as drug dealers because they cannot be criminally prosecuted. On April 15, the newly appointed Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen announced that while he does not agree with his political spokesman, Peter Christensen, and legal spokesman, Kim Andersen, who have both called for the abolition of the age of criminal responsibility altogether, he also does not agree that it should remain where it is now.

“The political environment changes every time [shootings occur],” lamented Sareen, a member of the minority of politicians trying to counter such harsh rhetoric. A relatively young politician with an immigrant background himself, Sareen called Danes’ automatic condemnation of all immigrants “extremely depressing.”

“Every time we experience a problem, especially with immigrants, then [politicians] talk about lowering the criminal age,” said Sareen wearily. It’s hard to speak out against this proposal, he explained, “because when you have problems and people are afraid, you can say with confidence: ‘We have to punish.’ People will agree with that.” But Sareen and many other crime specialists and politicians oppose responding to increased gang violence by lowering the criminal age. Instead they favor rehabilitation approaches because, Sareen said, “We know if you punish harder, that it won’t help.”

Failing to Fit

As the idea of a “cultural conflict” spreads, discussion about integration — or rather, its failure in Denmark — has increased as well. According to Jyllands-Posten, a Danish daily newspaper, 47,000 immigrant Danish youths from non-Western countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey reported feeling marginalized and alienated from Danish society or in danger of becoming so. One in four immigrants, compared to one in 10 ethnic Danes who feel the same way. The report concluded, “Excluding large groups of society leads to widespread dissatisfaction or even criminality, as we’ve seen in the constant disturbances in Nørrebro.”

The gang war has roots in business competition as well as in ethnic conflict, and sometimes the two blur together. Hells Angels, one of the main Danish biker gangs, has dominated the hash black market until recently, when they began to be challenged by immigrant gangs like Glober’s Best. A similar war broke out in 1996 between Hells Angels and another gang, the Banditos, which was resolved by mediated peace agreements that carved the country up for each group. A source from the DNP explained, “It’s all mainly about profit and turf … [The only difference is that] Hells Angels and Banditos were mainly Danes. Now [the turf war] is not only between ethnic Danes.”

This difference has been highlighted repeatedly in the news. As a result, many citizens view the conflict as one between different ethnic groups. “But it’s wrong to blow it up to a racial aspect,” said the DNP officer. “It’s mostly about fight for the drug market.”

Sareen and most other politicians disagree with the DNP’s insistence that immigration should be left out of discussion. While he does not think ethnic conflict causes gang violence, Sareen points to ethnic Danes’ bias against Muslim gangs as one of many challenges facing Denmark’s immigrants as they seek to integrate into Danish society and find acceptance.

Sareen blames “soft” Danish educational theory for many of immigrant youths’ problems today. “We need to drop the idea that all children should be treated equally no matter what background they come from,” he said to Jyllands-Posten. “It doesn’t matter whether a young boy is a Dane or an immigrant, if he comes from an authoritarian home that doesn’t have this Danish ‘discuss everything’ culture, then he won’t respond to talk and feelings. What he needs is firm rules and guidelines he can understand.”

But instead of implementing harsher punishments, Sareen suggested approaching the problem from an angle that accounts for poverty as well as ethnicity. “Ask why we have these problems,” Sareen insists. “We know you are not born criminal … [but] when you have social problems, when you are poor or drop out of school, then it’s very easy to become a criminal.”

Unfortunately, while the City Council has invested in new programs for immigrant children and parents, poverty levels continue to rise. Denmark’s Finance Ministry released new figures in March indicating that the number of people living in poverty in Denmark increased by 26 percent from 2001 to 2006. Over that same time, the percentage of the immigrant population living below the poverty line increased from one in 10 to one in seven.

Sareen lamented: “We have too many kids dropping out of youth education schools. It’s very important, especially for minorities, to get through schools, so that’s the most important task for the Danish government.”

With issues like the gang violence and the global economic crisis at the forefront, however, neither local nor national government is likely to have extensive resources to devote to integration and social reforms.

Peace, for Now

In a country like Denmark, which espouses free speech and egalitarianism, these recent responses to gang warfare may be part of a larger trend sweeping Europe. Since 2004, most European countries have shifted rightward, as the priorities of the new security-and-order agenda, the “Third Way,” dominate national politics. In response to concerns about terrorism and economic security, there has been a growing fixation on physical security, border controls, and immigration, reflected in the increased number of conservative EU and Danish Parliament members.

In Denmark, responses to recent gang violence — and the resulting cycles between peace and xenophobia — mask the constant need to address the root causes of crime and societal alienation. When violence tapered off after March, newspapers stopped running headlines on gangs. While citizens like Hansen and Andersen return to their daily lives and nightlife cautiously drifts back to Nørrebro, politicians like Sareen press for more open and less sensationalized discussion before the next outbreak. With the marked change in public opinion, however, this will prove to be an uphill battle.

My Khanh Ngo is a junior Political Science and International Studies double major in Davenport College. She is spending spring semester studying abroad in Copenhagen.

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