Sweden’s prime minister on Thursday said that he’s summoned the head of the military to discuss how the armed forces can help police deal with an unprecedented crime wave that has shocked the country with almost daily shootings and bombings.
Getting the military involved in crime-fighting would be a highly unusual step for Sweden, underscoring the severity of the gang violence that has claimed a dozen lives across the country this month, including teenagers and innocent bystanders.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that he would meet with the armed forces’ supreme commander and the national police commissioner on Friday to explore “how the armed forces can help police in their work against the criminal gangs.”
What is causing this rise in Sweden? I’m not really up to speed on Swedish news or politics.
The most recent increase is from one of the largest gangs splintering. Different groupings and gangs are attacking each other and each others families, trying to gain power. Is what the news seems to say.
On the larger scale, if you look to scientists, criminologists, and not politicians, there are a lot of contributing factors. Hardest anti-drugs laws in Europe, more or less, failing school systems, failing integration, gentrification. All contribute to create a high risk high reward enviornment that seem worth it to a lot of people compared to a more ordinary life.
I think your comment has been the most helpful so far. I had no clue that Sweden had strict drug laws. Thanks for the reply!
I wonder why the headlines seem to focus on Sweden right now when the other countries of western Europe seem to have similar issues right now.
Highest anti-drug laws? In Sweden??
The entire shtick of this story is that Sweden is one of the most lenient when it comes to policing, and one of the most generous when it comes to social safety net, and it still won’t stop crime from escalating year over year
Well it’s not just that they are shooting at each other. They often force kids below the age of 15 to do the killing and they aren’t any sniper elite so to say. What I’m trying to say is that people outside of the gang world also die since the executioner some times shoots up the wrong door, or throws a grenade too close to another house so that their neighbor dies.
Sweden has accepted a LOT of refugees over the last eight years. Now 20% of the entire country is foreign born. Much higher when you include second and third generation migrants.
Unfortunately, migrants in Sweden are far over-represented in crime. Especially violent crime: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338563093_Migrants_…
All of the bombings, for example, are gang related, and gang members in Sweden have a disproportionately foreign background.
Almost all gang members in Sweden are either 1st- or 2nd-generation migrants: https://www.gulf-insider.com/almost-all-gang-members-in-sweden-are-either-1st-or-2nd-generation-migrants/amp/
What’s clear from the data is that not all refugees commit crime at the same rate. Refugees from Vietnam, for example, committed very low crime. Ditto for Ukrainian refugees. Syrian and Somali refugees, on the other hand, have sky high crime. Sweden has accepted a lot of refugees from these regions, among others.
Over-representation in crime has a lot of reasons. Yes, one of them is the cultural dimension, but every single time these statistics are normalized for socioeconomic status, it drops immediately to levels extremely close to those of Swedes born to Swedish parents. Time and time again these statistics come to the same old boring conclusion we all know: poverty, lack of integration, having no way to enter the job market, discrimination. These are the reasons we see the results we see today.
“Immigrants” is not the reason for crime. This is flawed logic. What is the reason immigrants are overrepresented in statiscis? That’s the real question. You comment ignores what immigrants have brought to Sweden which has been extremely positive.
Immigrants in Sweden have higher education and yet only end up in low-paying jobs. . Despite these difficulties, they have in finding jobs that fit their qualification level, and as of 2020, “34 per cent of all practising medical doctors and 12 per cent of all nurses in Sweden are immigrants. Sweden’s most common profession is personal care worker or assistant nurse (undersköterska). Of all 183,000 assistant nurses, 48,329 or 26 per cent were born abroad. The most common region of origin of assistant nurses was Asia, which includes the Middle East.” (source). I work in tech and we constantly have a “shortage of talent”, and a large portion of programmers I know are non-Swedish. We could go on about this for days.
Basically, if “immigrants” in Sweden (however you may like to define it and however many people you can lump into that term) were to not go to work tomorrow, Sweden would stand still and the clinics won’t function.
Sweden studied this: https://bra.se/publikationer/arkiv/publikationer/2023-03-01-socioekonomisk-bakgrund-och-brott.html
Most people who come from a socio-economically less favourable background do not commit more crime than people who come from a more favourable background, and it also happens that people from a more favourable background do commit crime. This means that even if there is a connection between socio-economic background and involvement in crime, that connection is weak. It is not possible to appreciably predict who will commit crimes based on knowledge of people’s socio-economic background.
Instead, other risk factors have a stronger relationship with criminal behaviour. When compared with factors that research has identified as risk factors for crime, such as parenting competence, the presence of conflicts in the family, school problems or association with criminal peers, the research shows that these have a stronger connection with criminal behaviour than socio-economic background factors. The same applies to risk factors linked to the individual himself, for example permissive attitudes or impulsivity.
In other words, the cultural component is far more important than the socio-economic component. Over the decades, Europe has accepted migrants of many different cultures, and despite also being poor, many of these communities commit far less crime.
No one is blaming all immigrants for crime. As per the data, some specific immigrants are responsible for the majority of crime, per capita.
Some immigrants are doctors, and as above, no one is complaining about them. The immigrants people are complaining about are the ones committing horrific crimes. [alternative Swedish source] This is one story of thousands and thousands and thousands. That nine year old girl was left brain damaged after suffering brutal rape by a man who had recently been granted asylum.
This is the conclusion from the study you linked.
One thing I’ve seen often is that people who claim “certain types of immigrants” are problematic don’t read studies properly or cherry pick what they like.
No, they just complain about people who look like them, have the same skin color as them, and sometimes them (by mistake, I suppose?). “No one” is a huge generalizing in this time when even the highly-skilled “right” type of immigrants are now having problems thanks to this SD rhetoric, and some are even considering leaving the country.
Unfortunately a lot of those committing those crimes now are teenagers who have lost touch with society and they are most likely Swedish citizens by now. So how do we go from here?
I encourage you to read that paragraph again if you think it says anything other when what I have already claimed. Please pay particular attention this part: “The correlation between socioeconomic background and crime is weak”.
Well you’ll have to take it up with those alleged people. Myself and those in this post are not making that argument.
The solutions are complex, and Sweden is beginning to look to Denmark. The first step is to prevent the problem getting worse. This means halting all migration from regions where immigrants demonstrate a higher per capita rate of crime. Clearly their cultural values are incompatible with Sweden. Secondly, ghettos are causing major issues in Sweden. Denmark prevents the formation of ghettos by limiting the proportion of refugees by region in any single area. Refugees are encouraged to integrate by being placed into Danish neighbourhoods. This encourages refugees to learn the language and adopt Danish values. This is crucial for integration. Finally, more demands must be placed on refugees. In Denmark, refugees must complete gates, including learning Danish, and finding a job. There are consequences for failure to comply. Sweden has no such obligations on refugees. Or at least, they did not until recently.
Despite Sweden investing more into integration than arguably any other country on Earth, their outcomes are poor. So the issue isn’t about resources. It’s about compliance. Their method isn’t working and it’s time they start imposing obligations on refugees.
You and I read the same conclusion. You took out the single part that supports your claim and ignored the rest. The whole study is about how socioeconomic status related to crime and that the factors and explanatory models are varied with no consensus among researchers. The idea of the correlation being weak is that you cannot predict criminality risk with only socioeconomic. Instead, the chain of cause and effect is much more inderect and nuanced. Look at this paragraph:
You are misreading it and possibly misinterpreting what a correlation entails. If I wanted to predict the criminal risk for a person, I cannot rely on socioeconomic alone. That, however, does not mean that socioeconomic reasons don’t contribute to this, and if that was part of your conclusion then I think you are seriously misinterpreting this meta study…
Uhhh those are no longer foreign.
I didn’t call them foreign. I explicitly excluded that group from the first statement, and added the qualifier so that readers would understand the distinction. Which you appear to have.
Right now it’s an internal gang conflict that has escalated to killing relatives, and at least one mom. It’s become brutal enough to happen in the open streets in some cases, and there’s been a few unrelated innocents caught in the cross fire as well. The split seems to partly be over the use of younger and younger kids for the deeds, and the escalating brutality.
The gang in question is the Foxtrot Network led by Rawa Majid, who is funnily enough hiding in Turkey and has apparently had help by a high up turkey police official.
That’s the very quick version, but there should be quite a bit of info if you google “Rawa Majid Foxtrot”.
Curious too. Scandinavian countries have such a reputation for being modern and progressed nations with a perfectly working welfare state and high internal stability and ideally dutiful citizens.
Not really a decent picture anymore. Some handpicked examples: Schools are now the most privatized in the world, in a charter-system where public money gets poured into private companies – one of which the heads of have been giving money to an anti-semitic far-right news paper. This has gentrified schools and ruined the public ones, and inflated the grades. The current government consists of/is supported by a party (~20% of votes) that was formed by literal nazis, not neo-nazis, but literal SS volunteering nazis, the current head of the party joined them just after the peak of the neo-nazi era, in which they, among other things celebrated a racist serial killer. Him and the closest circle of party elites, to this day, party with well a recognized neo-nazi band, calls any association to LGBTQ and pride “pedophilia”, and believes in the same conspiracy that the mass-murderer Breivik did: that there is a conspiracy of “multiculturalists” that have the explicit goal to exterminate the swedish nation and people. Their politics and hate gets next to zero push back from the other governing parties, and a lot of their policies are now being made law or are being prepared to become laws.
All of this is correct. I’d just like to add that, additionally, over the last couple of decades we have also systematically and agressively cut most taxes that mostly hit the very wealthy. Yes, (for now) we still have a somewhat functional wellfare system, but the wealth inequality is crazy high, which causes a lot of social stress and conflict.
For some quick examples:
All of this while the tax on actual work is very high, making it harder for those not already born with capital to aquire it.
I believe the majority of adult Swedes are like that, but the welfare system is not getting a decent budget, the healthcare system is overworked (especially in niche areas like child psychiatry). The current government has abandoned all of these important aspects and instead focused on wasting people’s taxes, creating confusing and unsatisfactory budgets, ruining the climate goal for 2030 (which Sweden was going to meet) and focusing solely on linking immigration to crime (as the sole cause) and mistreating immigrabts even though they make up 40% of the medical workforce.
hmm what has happened to change the population in the past decade
the swedes.
just one example: out of all european countries sweden is the least integrative with the lowest number of migrants finding a job within 15 years of living in sweden. nationalisms way got paved by the laziness of the swede who rather throws money at a problem than brains.