"Give me your phone - otherwise I'll kill you".

May 2019 in Kortedala, Gothenburg. A 15-year-old is robbed on his cellphone. The words, according to him, come from one of the robbers before they take a strangulation around his neck and threaten to kill him if he tells anyone. Police identify a suspect, a 16-year-old guy. But he is not arrested.

"The only thing we could have done in that situation would have been to pick him up quickly, but we never could have kept him," says Anders Klingberg, investigator responsible for Northeast Gothenburg.

The suspect is on the loose. Four months later, he is suspected of having, along with others, committed another robbery, against two 13-year-old boys.

- I remember what it was like, I felt my own legs go down, says one of them.

The National Prosecutor's new guidelines from 2017 came as an adaptation to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children - all persons under the age of 18 - may only be deprived of liberty as a last resort and for the shortest possible time. But criticism comes from the police team.

Assignment review has conducted a survey with police youth groups in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Several of the groups testify to problems in investigating young people who commit robbery.

- I don't see that this should have anything to do with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is not to be released and then be able to talk about it all, it does not earn that child anything, says Anders Klingberg in Northeast Gothenburg.

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Assignment review can also show a number of cases where suspected robbers were released before being interrogated. The prosecutors refer to the National Prosecutor's guidelines and explain that it is not possible to arrest the suspects with regard to their age.

The new guidelines mean that special reasons are needed to arrest criminally charged children, ie persons between 15 and 17 years.

- The starting point is, of course, from the legislature that young people should not be deprived of liberty. It should be as a last resort to deprive young people of liberty, and in as short a time as possible, says Lennart Guné, prosecutor and head of the development center at the Prosecutor's Office.

A crime that is robbery is serious enough that special reasons can exist - but in order to arrest a young suspect there must also be sufficiently strong, special arrest grounds. Therefore, it will be an interpretation question for each prosecutor, according to Lennart Guné.

In 12 of the 16 police districts in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö that Assignment Review talked to, managers and investigators state that they are sometimes forced to release young robbers without questioning. Some even describe it as usual.

"Before, we did not have the problem of being released in the same way, we got them arrested, maybe only overnight but we had to hold the hearing," says the group head of the Malmö Police's youth investigations.

Boxiao Pan, preliminary investigator in Täby, says it is extremely rare for a prosecutor to arrest a 16-year-old who has been arrested, suspected of robbery.

- They sit detained for a few hours at their height. Then they are out and then they have become aware that the police know about this, then it is very easy for them to go and attack the plaintiffs and witnesses again.

When the new guidelines came, prosecutors were worried that they would have "major negative consequences" for the opportunity to fight crime. Six months ago, the Prosecutor's Office came up with an evaluation stating that the guidelines achieved their purpose.

The number of arrests had decreased, especially for minor crimes.

Youth Prosecutor Linda Wiking, on the other hand, thinks that the prosecutor's guidelines actually give room to arrest young suspected robbers. She is critical of prosecutors who choose to release suspects before being questioned.

- Then we do not apply the guidelines and the legal text as intended. We will use the tools we have, when there are reasons for it. And there are serious crimes there and when there is a risk of ruining the investigation on a free basis, she says.