First of, we're discussing violent crime here. Rape and/or sexual assault is often non-violent and hence a different type of crime. Second, Wikipedia is an inc

First of, we're discussing violent crime here. Rape and/or sexual assault is often non-violent and hence a different type of crime. Second, Wikipedia is an incredibly unreliable source for anything controversial and since the Orange Man decided make an example of the country ("Last night in Sweden..."), it's crime statistics became incredibly controversial! It is correct that the number of reported crimes has increased, which is not the same thing as an increase in the actual crime rate. If we instead look at homicide and manslaughter (dödligt våld) per 100 000 inhabitants, it paints a different picture: https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/5lr3u6/mord_per_capita_per_%C3%A5r_i_sverige/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/5lr3u6/mord_per_cap... Note that the y-axis begins at 0.5 so it looks like the increase and decrease was larger than it was. We can also look at victim surveys. The number of people who claims to have been the victim of violent crime: https://www.bra.se/images/18.221265bc145ae05f27a1831/1400769979758/BU2014-Andel-utsatta-f%C3%B6r-n%C3%A5got-v%C3%A5ld.png https://www.bra.se/images/18.221265bc145ae05f27a1831/1400769... Blue line is for young people 16+, purple line for the adult population (16-79) and green line also for the adult population (16-84). In reality, violent crime has decreased much more than what those graphs indicates. The reason is that the threshold for what constitutes violent "crime" has lowered. For example, 30 years ago someone who "lost a streetfight" likely wouldn't have considered himself a victim, nor would a woman who was slapped by her husband. But today they would because attitudes change. Therefore, counter-intuitively, the number of crime reports increases as crime decreases.