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.
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.
Much higher when you include second and third generation migrants
Uhhh those are no longer foreign.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
No one is blaming all immigrants for crime. As per the data, some specific immigrants are responsible for the majority of crime, per capita.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- We have a uniquely regressive tax on real estate. There is a value cap over which no more tax is added, and that cap is CRAZY low, meaning someone with a mansion is not taxed significantly more than someone with a small house.
- We have insanely low taxes on capital gains, which are a bit complicated to explain but essentially means that on a good year you might pay the equivalent of low single digit percent tax on the value increase.
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.
