6 ms·

Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? And I don't know if it is the

Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? And I don't know if it is the same in Sweden, but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods. So again, nothing to worry about.

trendia 10y ago
Well according to this article, crime across the whole country has gone down, so who really cares if there are pockets where the violence is so bad that police can't do their job? I mean, who cares if there are 30 gernade attacks in Malmo [0] as long as overall deaths in Stockholm habe gone down by more than 30? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_S...
- autokad 10y ago
  "The number of confirmed or suspected shootings was 20 per cent higher in 2014 than in 2006. The statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33." does anyone else find it strange how they keep jumping around in (what feels like arbitrary) years?
  - hogrammer 10y ago
    It's not strange if you know why they're doing it.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Looks like cherry-picking to me.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  Exactly. We worry about those pockets of crime/violence and the media attention is disproportionate here too. The international attention is just mind blowing seeing as nothing has changed over the last decade (these areas were shit 10 years ago too!). But all this doesn't mean the country suddenly is on the verge of collapse. Yes it's true: there are pockets where Ambulances are stoned by local kids and need police escorts. That's not a vicious rumor. It's a tiny area (few blocks) of the country though. I'm sure many countries have terrible areas. How our areas somehow turned on ambulance and firefighters is a complete mystery to me though.
onion2k 10y ago
Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? I wouldn't be surprised if every country has areas people claim are like that. England: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647355/Firefighters-attacked-ten-times-week-Britain-including-thugs-throwing-bottles-bricks-paving-stones.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647355/Firefighters... Scotland: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bonfire-night-marred-attacks-firefighters-9206541 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bonfire-nigh... Wales: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/youths-attacked-firefighters-fireworks-tried-12113952 http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/youths-attacked... USA: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/12/01/attacks-firefighters-not-rare/76604000/ http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/12/01/at... Ireland: http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-sickening-moment-thugs-attack-7882192 http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-sickening-mo... Those links are only to illustrate what people claim happen. They're not necessarily representative of what things are actually like. Talking to people who live in these places is just about the only way to get a good idea.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Reports of youths stoning firemen are in the newspaper every couple of months in my UK city. Firemen report it as truth too, it has been specifically mentioned when I've visited fire stations (Scout visits). The youths are never charged from what I can tell, the police just disperse them. I assume this means the incidents don't go in to crime statistics. That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps; that may be over-cynical.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > my UK city > That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps It is overly cynical. The UK has two sets of crime statistics: police recorded crime and the annual crime survey. Even the police recorded crime stats (which aren't regarded as statistically reliable) don't only rely on arrests, but include all reported crimes. So police arresting or not wouldn't affect the numbers. But the annual crime survey (which is statistically reliable) doesn't rely on police recording.
rmc 10y ago
> Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? Who reports that people do that? Tabloid newspapers? They've been lying about that for decades. After the 1989 Hillsbourogh disaster (where people died due to health & safety issues, and negligence from the police), tabloid newspaper The Sun wrote a full page headline accusing Liverpool fans of attacking police who were trying to save people. It was a complete fabrication. "Those people" attacking our police/first responders is a common lie that sells tabloid newspapers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun
- reacweb 10y ago
  you mean that the cost issues of bulletproof vest for firefighter were also fabrication ?
  - peteretep 10y ago
    Presumably, as you haven't added any source for your anecfact?
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Plenty of sources tell us that emergency services in metropolitan areas in Sweden wear protective vests. There are cost issues, and there are image issues, i.e. if the firemen are protected against you stabbing them, it's "militarization" and you'll see them as your enemy. E.g. Svenska Dagbladet (no fringe publication, a major newspaper): https://www.svd.se/ambulanspersonal-far-skyddsvastar https://www.svd.se/ambulanspersonal-far-skyddsvastar Of course, this is not unique. Plenty of American cities have the same: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/madison-firefighters-add-extra-layer-of-protection-with-bulletproof-vests/article_5f0fc4ce-0f08-51ed-8a25-79f99092d08b.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/madi...
- kahrkunne 10y ago
  Not Belgium but the Netherlands, I've seen it myself. Here it's a public issue, even being discussed in parliament.
threeseed 10y ago
You can say whatever you want. What's important and this release is trying to demonstrate is that if you're going to make claims then provide the evidence. Sure you could blame Muslims for those no-go areas. But you need to demonstrate it. And demonstrate absent other factors like socioeconomic status, unemployment rate etc.
denzil_correa 10y ago
> So nothing to worry about, right Who said there is nothing to worry? > but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods. First, source for not allowed to say. Second, what do you want to say?
piva00 10y ago
No, not like that at the fucking all. I live in Stockholm, I just came today to my home from a friend's place that is in one of these pesky little maps marking it as a "no-go zone". Seriously, there's nothing alarming there at all, it's a very normal area a little bit outside the center with more affordable housing (compared to the center of Stockholm but not even near "cheap") and that's about it. I've stayed on that friend's house for the whole of January, daily living there and haven't heard about a single crime happening. Asked my friend's flatmates just now and they laughed about it. Same thing for a friend that lives inside what some maps label as "no-go zone" in Kista, nothing happened there at all for the past year. So seriously, the alarmism here is very extrapolated compared to the actual risk. Compare to Belgium as you want but be a bit more honest about your utter ignorance instead of just a "And I don't know about Sweden"-trumpesque discourse.
- ra1n85 10y ago
  What's with the uptick in "grenade attacks"? Seems like there's been more in 2016 than in the four year period leading up to 2012? Really curious as to how this is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
  - mikko-apo 10y ago
    I don't know about Sweden, but in Finland the number of firebomb/grenade attacks increased a lot in the past few years. All of them due Finnish born right wing zealots trying to burn down the shelters housing the refugees. Luckily there seems to be less attacks in the last half a year. I think there's been more attacks, but here's a summary of some of them: http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 (Dec 2015, in finnish)
  - cfv 10y ago
    Reading your link I counted a hundred and twenty in 19 years. For about 9 million people in Sweden, that's a 120/(19 * 9 * 10^6) change of something happening each year. That's insanely small, compared to, say, the amount of people dying in bathtubs while intoxicated, which works out to 4377/(19 * 9 * 10^6) assuming this is a stagnant problem. (http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-13-216 http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...) Look, I'm fully aware you need to panic, and I'm fully aware this need is being satisfied by a bunch of cronies standing to make heaps of money on your panic. Just know your fear is not justified and should not be the reason for aiding the raise of fascism in europe.
peteretep 10y ago
> not really politically > allowed to say what kind > of people live in those > neighborhoods Same answer it's been for the last 500 years? Poor people with rampant underemployment? Wonder what America would be like today if they'd cleared out all Italian and Irish immigrants 100 years ago because of immigrant ghettos?
- koonsolo 10y ago
  Go ask the Native Americans what they think about all those immigrants.
  - peteretep 10y ago
    You appear to have confused the word immigrant and the word invader?
    - chappi42 10y ago
      It might increasingly become difficult to differ: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26329018 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26329018 And you don't think that certainly more than half a billion africans would deserve to live a much better live than what is possible where they live now? Solution imho only can be to 'fix' those countries and 'fix' the birthrates. Globalization also means that certain customs no longer are tolerable...
paublyrne 10y ago
There are areas in Dublin where children and teenagers throw stones at fire brigades and they are certainly not immigrants. These are old white Irish areas. What sets them apart is high levels of unemployment, poverty and under employment.
- anjc 10y ago
  What sets the no-go zones apart in places like Sweden is that, not only are they filled with poor unemployed people, but those people have a different ideology and come from third world countries, and therefore the crimes perpetrated are different from that of the indigenous population. There isn't even a street in Dublin in which that's the case. There are certainly places in Dublin where you might be more likely to get yourself robbed in, but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? Nowhere.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    So the latter is much worse?
    - anjc 10y ago
      Eh, of course it is?
  - paublyrne 10y ago
    but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? And where are you suggesting such a place does exist? In Sweden? If you have any links to reports of incidents like you're describing I'd love to see them.
    - anjc 10y ago
      I've seen scores of videos on Youtube showing that these attacks, if not normal, do happen at least in Sweden. You can read the stats in the thread again for proof, or search for videos yourself if you don't believe the stats. And I can anecdotally state that I've witnessed attacks first hand in Muslim areas in both Belgium and France due to ideological reasons (e.g. a girl in my party was assaulted because she touched a man's arm and apparently shouldn't have). I've lived in the worst parts of Dublin and yeah, problems can arise, but they're non-ideological ones. Which means that you can avoid them by using general street smarts.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
The kids near me do that. They even set fire to abandoned buildings in order to ensure the fire-fighters show up. They're not migrants, refugees or any kind of ethnic minority though. Just poor and bored.
alicorn 10y ago
I think one of the problems when talking about these issues is the frame of reference. I have lived in the most dangerous part of our town (Linköping) for several years. I come from Latvia where a 'dangerous' part of a town meant that you do not go there because you will be robbed / knifed / shot in broad daylight. It was absolutely not the case with the most dangerous part of Linköping, even though people who had not had a direct experience with the place kept talking about it in the same way as I would talk about a true 'no-go' zone in Latvia. The worst thing that happened to me there was that my bicycle got stolen because I had forgotten to lock it overnight. My kid was playing outside unsupervised every day, I was coming home alone in the middle of night etc. Never had a single unpleasant experience. The same is true about rape. In Sweden, the definition of rape and sexual abuse is incredibly broad. I know a person who got accused of sexual abuse by his wife because she said he had slipped up a finger in her vagina while asleep without her consent. Once. Several years ago. Can you imagine any other country where a case like this would ever be looked at even remotely seriously? Moreover, incidents involving sexual abuse are reported a lot more often, because everyone is a lot more informed about what consent means and what their rights are. It is highly unusual in the global context. So rape in Sweden is nothing like rape pretty much anywhere else in the world. I could talk a lot more about these issues, but these two points are the most important to keep in mind when discussing crime in Sweden relative to crime everywhere else in the world.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  Exactly, using the Swedish tabloid definition of a "no-go zone", the poorer parts of most US cities would be no-go zones.
  - sundvor 10y ago
    This. The relative safety between Scandinavian countries and most of the US really needs to be brought up more. As far as gun violence goes, the US almost turned into a no-go country as far as myself is concerned.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
glenndebacker 10y ago
"but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods" It would help because those things are mostly done by the youth born there. Most migrants in a small (2sq miles although some like to extrapolate it to the whole country) community like Molenbeek (where most of those problems originate) are second generation or more. We are way past the point where it's a migration problem or where a migration stop would help. I don't know how closing our borders or my absolute favourite "sending them back to their country of origin" (which will result in an infinite loop) will really help. But then again for some we are not allowed to point to socio-economic problems, they pretend that it simply doesn't exist or it's the complete fault of the other side. What I often see in Belgium is the argument that Mohammed should find a job or that most are lazy. But from the moment we the see the name on his resume or he shows up to do our garage door installation, it's a big "no-go" also. It's a vicious circle that works both ways.
- koonsolo 10y ago
  100% agree with you. It's a problem that is not easily fixed. Taking about the vicious circle, I heard of a company that basically discards any resume with a male Arabic name in it, because they had lots of problems with that group in the past, but not for the women. Too bad for the Mohammed who wants to do a good job of course. Very hard problem, but it all starts with being totally honest about the situation.
nunobrito 10y ago
There is a lot to worry about. Most are forced to correlate crime and migration because they can't write online that the real thing bothering Westerners is the virulent growth of an anachronistic religion that makes both men and women subservient to an old book or wizard in the sky. Somehow we'll find a few fellows here defending the increasing percentage of women completely dressed as ninjas as something natural in modern societies. Neglecting the violence that happens to them when they don't dress that way. HN, it's time to be honest. That's the real elephant in the room.

trendia 10y ago

Well according to this article, crime across the whole country has gone down, so who really cares if there are pockets where the violence is so bad that police can't do their job? I mean, who cares if there are 30 gernade attacks in Malmo [0] as long as overall deaths in Stockholm habe gone down by more than 30? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_S...

autokad 10y ago
"The number of confirmed or suspected shootings was 20 per cent higher in 2014 than in 2006. The statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33." does anyone else find it strange how they keep jumping around in (what feels like arbitrary) years?
- hogrammer 10y ago
  It's not strange if you know why they're doing it.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  Looks like cherry-picking to me.
alkonaut 10y ago
Exactly. We worry about those pockets of crime/violence and the media attention is disproportionate here too. The international attention is just mind blowing seeing as nothing has changed over the last decade (these areas were shit 10 years ago too!). But all this doesn't mean the country suddenly is on the verge of collapse. Yes it's true: there are pockets where Ambulances are stoned by local kids and need police escorts. That's not a vicious rumor. It's a tiny area (few blocks) of the country though. I'm sure many countries have terrible areas. How our areas somehow turned on ambulance and firefighters is a complete mystery to me though.

onion2k 10y ago

Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? I wouldn't be surprised if every country has areas people claim are like that. England: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647355/Firefighters-attacked-ten-times-week-Britain-including-thugs-throwing-bottles-bricks-paving-stones.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647355/Firefighters... Scotland: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bonfire-night-marred-attacks-firefighters-9206541 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bonfire-nigh... Wales: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/youths-attacked-firefighters-fireworks-tried-12113952 http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/youths-attacked... USA: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/12/01/attacks-firefighters-not-rare/76604000/ http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/12/01/at... Ireland: http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-sickening-moment-thugs-attack-7882192 http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-sickening-mo... Those links are only to illustrate what people claim happen. They're not necessarily representative of what things are actually like. Talking to people who live in these places is just about the only way to get a good idea.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
Reports of youths stoning firemen are in the newspaper every couple of months in my UK city. Firemen report it as truth too, it has been specifically mentioned when I've visited fire stations (Scout visits). The youths are never charged from what I can tell, the police just disperse them. I assume this means the incidents don't go in to crime statistics. That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps; that may be over-cynical.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > my UK city > That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps It is overly cynical. The UK has two sets of crime statistics: police recorded crime and the annual crime survey. Even the police recorded crime stats (which aren't regarded as statistically reliable) don't only rely on arrests, but include all reported crimes. So police arresting or not wouldn't affect the numbers. But the annual crime survey (which is statistically reliable) doesn't rely on police recording.

rmc 10y ago

> Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right? Who reports that people do that? Tabloid newspapers? They've been lying about that for decades. After the 1989 Hillsbourogh disaster (where people died due to health & safety issues, and negligence from the police), tabloid newspaper The Sun wrote a full page headline accusing Liverpool fans of attacking police who were trying to save people. It was a complete fabrication. "Those people" attacking our police/first responders is a common lie that sells tabloid newspapers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun

reacweb 10y ago
you mean that the cost issues of bulletproof vest for firefighter were also fabrication ?
- peteretep 10y ago
  Presumably, as you haven't added any source for your anecfact?
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Plenty of sources tell us that emergency services in metropolitan areas in Sweden wear protective vests. There are cost issues, and there are image issues, i.e. if the firemen are protected against you stabbing them, it's "militarization" and you'll see them as your enemy. E.g. Svenska Dagbladet (no fringe publication, a major newspaper): https://www.svd.se/ambulanspersonal-far-skyddsvastar https://www.svd.se/ambulanspersonal-far-skyddsvastar Of course, this is not unique. Plenty of American cities have the same: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/madison-firefighters-add-extra-layer-of-protection-with-bulletproof-vests/article_5f0fc4ce-0f08-51ed-8a25-79f99092d08b.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/madi...
kahrkunne 10y ago
Not Belgium but the Netherlands, I've seen it myself. Here it's a public issue, even being discussed in parliament.

threeseed 10y ago

You can say whatever you want. What's important and this release is trying to demonstrate is that if you're going to make claims then provide the evidence. Sure you could blame Muslims for those no-go areas. But you need to demonstrate it. And demonstrate absent other factors like socioeconomic status, unemployment rate etc.

denzil_correa 10y ago

> So nothing to worry about, right Who said there is nothing to worry? > but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods. First, source for not allowed to say. Second, what do you want to say?

piva00 10y ago

No, not like that at the fucking all. I live in Stockholm, I just came today to my home from a friend's place that is in one of these pesky little maps marking it as a "no-go zone". Seriously, there's nothing alarming there at all, it's a very normal area a little bit outside the center with more affordable housing (compared to the center of Stockholm but not even near "cheap") and that's about it. I've stayed on that friend's house for the whole of January, daily living there and haven't heard about a single crime happening. Asked my friend's flatmates just now and they laughed about it. Same thing for a friend that lives inside what some maps label as "no-go zone" in Kista, nothing happened there at all for the past year. So seriously, the alarmism here is very extrapolated compared to the actual risk. Compare to Belgium as you want but be a bit more honest about your utter ignorance instead of just a "And I don't know about Sweden"-trumpesque discourse.

ra1n85 10y ago
What's with the uptick in "grenade attacks"? Seems like there's been more in 2016 than in the four year period leading up to 2012? Really curious as to how this is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
- mikko-apo 10y ago
  I don't know about Sweden, but in Finland the number of firebomb/grenade attacks increased a lot in the past few years. All of them due Finnish born right wing zealots trying to burn down the shelters housing the refugees. Luckily there seems to be less attacks in the last half a year. I think there's been more attacks, but here's a summary of some of them: http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 (Dec 2015, in finnish)
- cfv 10y ago
  Reading your link I counted a hundred and twenty in 19 years. For about 9 million people in Sweden, that's a 120/(19 * 9 * 10^6) change of something happening each year. That's insanely small, compared to, say, the amount of people dying in bathtubs while intoxicated, which works out to 4377/(19 * 9 * 10^6) assuming this is a stagnant problem. (http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-13-216 http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...) Look, I'm fully aware you need to panic, and I'm fully aware this need is being satisfied by a bunch of cronies standing to make heaps of money on your panic. Just know your fear is not justified and should not be the reason for aiding the raise of fascism in europe.

peteretep 10y ago

> not really politically > allowed to say what kind > of people live in those > neighborhoods Same answer it's been for the last 500 years? Poor people with rampant underemployment? Wonder what America would be like today if they'd cleared out all Italian and Irish immigrants 100 years ago because of immigrant ghettos?

koonsolo 10y ago
Go ask the Native Americans what they think about all those immigrants.
- peteretep 10y ago
  You appear to have confused the word immigrant and the word invader?
  - chappi42 10y ago
    It might increasingly become difficult to differ: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26329018 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26329018 And you don't think that certainly more than half a billion africans would deserve to live a much better live than what is possible where they live now? Solution imho only can be to 'fix' those countries and 'fix' the birthrates. Globalization also means that certain customs no longer are tolerable...

paublyrne 10y ago

There are areas in Dublin where children and teenagers throw stones at fire brigades and they are certainly not immigrants. These are old white Irish areas. What sets them apart is high levels of unemployment, poverty and under employment.

anjc 10y ago
What sets the no-go zones apart in places like Sweden is that, not only are they filled with poor unemployed people, but those people have a different ideology and come from third world countries, and therefore the crimes perpetrated are different from that of the indigenous population. There isn't even a street in Dublin in which that's the case. There are certainly places in Dublin where you might be more likely to get yourself robbed in, but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? Nowhere.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  So the latter is much worse?
  - anjc 10y ago
    Eh, of course it is?
- paublyrne 10y ago
  but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? And where are you suggesting such a place does exist? In Sweden? If you have any links to reports of incidents like you're describing I'd love to see them.
  - anjc 10y ago
    I've seen scores of videos on Youtube showing that these attacks, if not normal, do happen at least in Sweden. You can read the stats in the thread again for proof, or search for videos yourself if you don't believe the stats. And I can anecdotally state that I've witnessed attacks first hand in Muslim areas in both Belgium and France due to ideological reasons (e.g. a girl in my party was assaulted because she touched a man's arm and apparently shouldn't have). I've lived in the worst parts of Dublin and yeah, problems can arise, but they're non-ideological ones. Which means that you can avoid them by using general street smarts.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

The kids near me do that. They even set fire to abandoned buildings in order to ensure the fire-fighters show up. They're not migrants, refugees or any kind of ethnic minority though. Just poor and bored.

alicorn 10y ago

I think one of the problems when talking about these issues is the frame of reference. I have lived in the most dangerous part of our town (Linköping) for several years. I come from Latvia where a 'dangerous' part of a town meant that you do not go there because you will be robbed / knifed / shot in broad daylight. It was absolutely not the case with the most dangerous part of Linköping, even though people who had not had a direct experience with the place kept talking about it in the same way as I would talk about a true 'no-go' zone in Latvia. The worst thing that happened to me there was that my bicycle got stolen because I had forgotten to lock it overnight. My kid was playing outside unsupervised every day, I was coming home alone in the middle of night etc. Never had a single unpleasant experience. The same is true about rape. In Sweden, the definition of rape and sexual abuse is incredibly broad. I know a person who got accused of sexual abuse by his wife because she said he had slipped up a finger in her vagina while asleep without her consent. Once. Several years ago. Can you imagine any other country where a case like this would ever be looked at even remotely seriously? Moreover, incidents involving sexual abuse are reported a lot more often, because everyone is a lot more informed about what consent means and what their rights are. It is highly unusual in the global context. So rape in Sweden is nothing like rape pretty much anywhere else in the world. I could talk a lot more about these issues, but these two points are the most important to keep in mind when discussing crime in Sweden relative to crime everywhere else in the world.

literallycancer 10y ago
Exactly, using the Swedish tabloid definition of a "no-go zone", the poorer parts of most US cities would be no-go zones.
- sundvor 10y ago
  This. The relative safety between Scandinavian countries and most of the US really needs to be brought up more. As far as gun violence goes, the US almost turned into a no-go country as far as myself is concerned.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

glenndebacker 10y ago

"but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods" It would help because those things are mostly done by the youth born there. Most migrants in a small (2sq miles although some like to extrapolate it to the whole country) community like Molenbeek (where most of those problems originate) are second generation or more. We are way past the point where it's a migration problem or where a migration stop would help. I don't know how closing our borders or my absolute favourite "sending them back to their country of origin" (which will result in an infinite loop) will really help. But then again for some we are not allowed to point to socio-economic problems, they pretend that it simply doesn't exist or it's the complete fault of the other side. What I often see in Belgium is the argument that Mohammed should find a job or that most are lazy. But from the moment we the see the name on his resume or he shows up to do our garage door installation, it's a big "no-go" also. It's a vicious circle that works both ways.

koonsolo 10y ago
100% agree with you. It's a problem that is not easily fixed. Taking about the vicious circle, I heard of a company that basically discards any resume with a male Arabic name in it, because they had lots of problems with that group in the past, but not for the women. Too bad for the Mohammed who wants to do a good job of course. Very hard problem, but it all starts with being totally honest about the situation.

nunobrito 10y ago

There is a lot to worry about. Most are forced to correlate crime and migration because they can't write online that the real thing bothering Westerners is the virulent growth of an anachronistic religion that makes both men and women subservient to an old book or wizard in the sky. Somehow we'll find a few fellows here defending the increasing percentage of women completely dressed as ninjas as something natural in modern societies. Neglecting the violence that happens to them when they don't dress that way. HN, it's time to be honest. That's the real elephant in the room.