7 ms·

I don't know the article you're talking about and I haven't looked up violent crime statistics for Sweden - but a couple of anecdotes from you and your friends

I don't know the article you're talking about and I haven't looked up violent crime statistics for Sweden - but a couple of anecdotes from you and your friends does not necessarily mean that violent crime across the country is increasing, right?

kruxigt 6y ago
Crimes are increasing and immigrants are now committing almost all violent crimes (80%+ on a per capita basis probably. Proper statistics is not really "allowed" but private well done research as well as anecdotes from many policemen including in my family point to that). However total crimes are not increasing that fast since immigrants still make up a minority of the population and the native population still has a decreasing curve of violent crimes just like almost all western countries.
- pliftkl 6y ago
  I think the objection to statistics about immigration (or minority populations) and crime is that they are inherently misleading because they generally compare crime rate to the population as a whole (as you did, jumping to the per capita), rather than to equivalent socio-economic groups. Consider two headlines: "immigrants commit most of the violent crime in this country" vs "most violent crime in this country is committed by poor people, and most immigrants are poor". How you phrase the headline makes a big difference in how people might think about policy.
  - so_tiring 6y ago
    Perhaps. Although I think in both cases the answer is that I would want fewer or no immigrants. The fact that "they're violent because they're immigrants" or "they're violent because they're poor" is quite irrelevant if you are the fireman being attacked by "youth" [1] There is an issue in France regarding attacks on firefighters. It's most likely caused by systemic racism and the constant discrimination faced by immigrants when they get controlled or arrested by firefighters. Or, quite simply, as you mentioned, poverty, forcing people to throw steel balls and fireworks at firemen, so they can feed their families. [1] https://www.thelocal.fr/20190820/attacks-are-becoming-the-new-normal-for-french-firefighters https://www.thelocal.fr/20190820/attacks-are-becoming-the-ne...
  - kruxigt 6y ago
    It is very clear that, compensating for living standards, people of African and MENA descent commit more crimes than native Swedes while people of East Asian descent do not.
    - kruxigt 6y ago
      Of course, such facts get downvoted as per usual.
jerzyt 6y ago
But, if you believe the person reporting from personal experience, and the newspaper reports something diametrically opposite, that should raise a question.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  It should raise questions such as "am I living in a bad neighborhood" or "am I living in a city with more crime than the average" with added caveats such as "just this year", before you jump to asking "is the government and/or mainstream media lying", is what I want to get at. "Crime has not significantly increased country-wide" and "two severe criminal incidents happened to me or my close friends recently" are in fact not mutually exclusive statements.
  - jeofken 6y ago
    I lived in Guldheden which is a pretty nice area, but my friend was living on Hisingen where Swedes are minority, at least from my ocular estimation on the street
ALittleLight 6y ago
There is evidence that crime in Sweden is increasing and not just anecdotes. In the simplest form we can just look at offences per 100k population as published by Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention. If you download and open the excel sheet for 2019 here[1] column C shows offenses per 100k of the population. The increase in this column is extreme compared to 1950, but that is probably because of a broadening of what is classified as an offense rather than the population becoming ~7.5 times more likely to commit crime. If you look at a more recent stretch of time, e.g. 1990 to 2019, you can plot the numbers of total offenses and add a trend line if it isn't obvious by looking at the column. We can also just look at what we might call "murder" in the US, or column I which shows "Completed murder, manslaughter, and assault resulting in death". The figure here shows that 2019 has a rate of 4 murders per 100k population which is an upward trend, you can look back at this column to confirm this for yourself. Sweden also publishes an annual crime survey where a nationally representative sample of Swedes are asked if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year [2]. This is actually not quite the same thing as the number of crimes because respondents just answer yes or no, so a respondent who has been repeatedly victimized will simply say yes, but their multiple victimizations will not be represented. This is a bit worse than you might think if crime tends to be localized to certain areas, which would make the people living in those areas more likely to be affected multiple times (and that probably is true in my opinion but I don't have a handy source for that). What the victimization survey shows is an upward bend in the lines that describe percentages of the population that have been the victim of different types of crime starting in 2015. I think it's worth pointing out that the graph is an objective scale, so a change from 2% to 2.5% may look small, but another way to think about it would be an increase of 25% of a certain type of crime. The text of this page[2] describes more detail about the survey results, but here is a quote that I think is representative - "Almost half (47%) of the population (aged 16–84) have great concern about crime in society, which is a significant increase compared to 2019 (43%) and the highest level measured since 2007." I think this is representative for two reasons. First, it shows that people in Sweden are concerned about crime and becoming moreso, which would fit given what we've seen in the survey and offense record data. Second, it shows that this is not some never-before seen problem in Sweden. Crime is increasing (as is concern about crime) but it is increasing on the scales of things that have happened before, as opposed to how an alarmist might describe it. Sweden also has an epidemic of "bombings". As near as I can tell it is the number one country for "bombings" in the world. Wikipedia has a good summary[3] and illustrative graph in the upper right hand corner. You can see in the graph that the problem explodes, as it were, in 2015 and later. Similar trend to what we saw in the crime data. Here is a quote from the wikipedia page - "According to police in Gothenburg and Malmö in 2016, the use of hand grenades by criminals in Sweden is a phenomenon which is unusual for all comparable countries both inside and outside the EU. According to criminologists Manne Gerell and Amir Rostami, the only other country that keeps track of hand grenade explosions is Mexico. While Mexico has a murder rate 20 times that of Sweden, on the specific category of grenade explosions per capita the two countries were comparable at the time" Earlier, I put "bombing" in scare quotes. This is because the word bombing to my mind conjures something like the Oklahoma City Bombing but in Sweden it is usually hand grenades, which do explode, but not nearly as much. Relatively few people are killed in Sweden's bombings - this news article explains a bit more [4] and there is an interesting report from the National Council for Crime Prevention [5] which is actually about shootings among Sweden's criminal element where investigators interview violent Swedish criminals and try to figure out why they committed these crimes. Though the focus is shootings, I expect bombings have similar motiviations (and the news article I linked shares the same sentiments). Basically, the bombings happen to intimidate rival gangs, scare away customers from enemy drug dealers, intimidate store owners into paying "protection" money, things like that. The police are fairly frequent targets of grenade attacks in Sweden too. I have a graph illustrating this somewhere, but for now, just look at Wikipedia's (incomplete) list of grenade attacks in Sweden [6] and ctrl-f for the word "police" and scroll through the page. You'll get an idea for the proportion of attacks which target the police (either police vehicles or buildings). There are also what I'll call "sensational" changes to crime. I don't mean that the changes are super huge or something, but rather I mean that some kinds of crime may have disproportionate impact on public perception because of their nature. I believe, though I can't easily demonstrate this as we can with the statistics above, that there are certain types of crime or behavior which are different from earlier behaviors. Bombings may fall into this category too. This category can be relatively mild, e.g. here[7] is a news story about a small town where a woman is complaining that she is now constantly harassed and afraid to work alone at her bakery because of men harassing her and making her feel unsafe. Other examples are things like mass car burnings, the NYT reported on an incident in 2018[8] where 100 cars were burned in one attack. Other examples of this type of thing are like this incident where two men were attacked, tortured, raped, and buried alive[9]. There are other examples of things like this were victims are beaten up, mutiliated, urinated on, taped, etc. But I hardly think a list of news articles detailing bad things that happened in Sweden would be very productive. The point is, there are sensational crimes in the media too. Maybe things like these are always happening, and maybe Swedish men always harassed small town bakers and waitresses to the point where they feel unsafe in their shops, but that's my intuition or impression from reading about it. Finally, I'll wrap up with a mention of gang rape, which I feel is also part of the sensational category in that it is such a dramatic and horrible crime that it causes an outsize impact on the public consciousness. The Swedish news organization Expressen investigated gang rapes where the gang rapists were convicted between 2016 and 2017. In an article [10] on their investigation they write: "The convicted perpetrators in the investigation are to a very large extent of foreign origin. 32 of them were born abroad. A total of 40 of the 43 convicted perpetrators are either foreign-born or born in Sweden with two immigrant parents." 1 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/crime-statistics.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/... 2 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/swedish-crime-survey.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/... 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden 4 - https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-with-hand-grenades-and-here-s-why https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-wit... 5 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/publications/2019-03-06-shootings-in-criminal-milieux.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/... 6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe... 7 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-kopa-henne/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-... 8 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-fires.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-f... 9 - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-radda-att-utsattas-for-valdsdad https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-ra... 10 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-mannen-som-valdtar-tillsammans/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-ma...
jeofken 6y ago
The dissonance between the article about us, and what I clearly see all around me, made me realise that the reporting is not aligned with the truth I know. My point is that if this is the case for topics I know, it’s likely also true for reporting about things foreign to me. Thus I take media with a rock of salt. Have you had the experience of reading in the newspaper about topics which you personally know?

kruxigt 6y ago

Crimes are increasing and immigrants are now committing almost all violent crimes (80%+ on a per capita basis probably. Proper statistics is not really "allowed" but private well done research as well as anecdotes from many policemen including in my family point to that). However total crimes are not increasing that fast since immigrants still make up a minority of the population and the native population still has a decreasing curve of violent crimes just like almost all western countries.

pliftkl 6y ago
I think the objection to statistics about immigration (or minority populations) and crime is that they are inherently misleading because they generally compare crime rate to the population as a whole (as you did, jumping to the per capita), rather than to equivalent socio-economic groups. Consider two headlines: "immigrants commit most of the violent crime in this country" vs "most violent crime in this country is committed by poor people, and most immigrants are poor". How you phrase the headline makes a big difference in how people might think about policy.
- so_tiring 6y ago
  Perhaps. Although I think in both cases the answer is that I would want fewer or no immigrants. The fact that "they're violent because they're immigrants" or "they're violent because they're poor" is quite irrelevant if you are the fireman being attacked by "youth" [1] There is an issue in France regarding attacks on firefighters. It's most likely caused by systemic racism and the constant discrimination faced by immigrants when they get controlled or arrested by firefighters. Or, quite simply, as you mentioned, poverty, forcing people to throw steel balls and fireworks at firemen, so they can feed their families. [1] https://www.thelocal.fr/20190820/attacks-are-becoming-the-new-normal-for-french-firefighters https://www.thelocal.fr/20190820/attacks-are-becoming-the-ne...
- kruxigt 6y ago
  It is very clear that, compensating for living standards, people of African and MENA descent commit more crimes than native Swedes while people of East Asian descent do not.
  - kruxigt 6y ago
    Of course, such facts get downvoted as per usual.

jerzyt 6y ago

But, if you believe the person reporting from personal experience, and the newspaper reports something diametrically opposite, that should raise a question.

raziel2p 6y ago
It should raise questions such as "am I living in a bad neighborhood" or "am I living in a city with more crime than the average" with added caveats such as "just this year", before you jump to asking "is the government and/or mainstream media lying", is what I want to get at. "Crime has not significantly increased country-wide" and "two severe criminal incidents happened to me or my close friends recently" are in fact not mutually exclusive statements.
- jeofken 6y ago
  I lived in Guldheden which is a pretty nice area, but my friend was living on Hisingen where Swedes are minority, at least from my ocular estimation on the street

ALittleLight 6y ago

There is evidence that crime in Sweden is increasing and not just anecdotes. In the simplest form we can just look at offences per 100k population as published by Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention. If you download and open the excel sheet for 2019 here[1] column C shows offenses per 100k of the population. The increase in this column is extreme compared to 1950, but that is probably because of a broadening of what is classified as an offense rather than the population becoming ~7.5 times more likely to commit crime. If you look at a more recent stretch of time, e.g. 1990 to 2019, you can plot the numbers of total offenses and add a trend line if it isn't obvious by looking at the column. We can also just look at what we might call "murder" in the US, or column I which shows "Completed murder, manslaughter, and assault resulting in death". The figure here shows that 2019 has a rate of 4 murders per 100k population which is an upward trend, you can look back at this column to confirm this for yourself. Sweden also publishes an annual crime survey where a nationally representative sample of Swedes are asked if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year [2]. This is actually not quite the same thing as the number of crimes because respondents just answer yes or no, so a respondent who has been repeatedly victimized will simply say yes, but their multiple victimizations will not be represented. This is a bit worse than you might think if crime tends to be localized to certain areas, which would make the people living in those areas more likely to be affected multiple times (and that probably is true in my opinion but I don't have a handy source for that). What the victimization survey shows is an upward bend in the lines that describe percentages of the population that have been the victim of different types of crime starting in 2015. I think it's worth pointing out that the graph is an objective scale, so a change from 2% to 2.5% may look small, but another way to think about it would be an increase of 25% of a certain type of crime. The text of this page[2] describes more detail about the survey results, but here is a quote that I think is representative - "Almost half (47%) of the population (aged 16–84) have great concern about crime in society, which is a significant increase compared to 2019 (43%) and the highest level measured since 2007." I think this is representative for two reasons. First, it shows that people in Sweden are concerned about crime and becoming moreso, which would fit given what we've seen in the survey and offense record data. Second, it shows that this is not some never-before seen problem in Sweden. Crime is increasing (as is concern about crime) but it is increasing on the scales of things that have happened before, as opposed to how an alarmist might describe it. Sweden also has an epidemic of "bombings". As near as I can tell it is the number one country for "bombings" in the world. Wikipedia has a good summary[3] and illustrative graph in the upper right hand corner. You can see in the graph that the problem explodes, as it were, in 2015 and later. Similar trend to what we saw in the crime data. Here is a quote from the wikipedia page - "According to police in Gothenburg and Malmö in 2016, the use of hand grenades by criminals in Sweden is a phenomenon which is unusual for all comparable countries both inside and outside the EU. According to criminologists Manne Gerell and Amir Rostami, the only other country that keeps track of hand grenade explosions is Mexico. While Mexico has a murder rate 20 times that of Sweden, on the specific category of grenade explosions per capita the two countries were comparable at the time" Earlier, I put "bombing" in scare quotes. This is because the word bombing to my mind conjures something like the Oklahoma City Bombing but in Sweden it is usually hand grenades, which do explode, but not nearly as much. Relatively few people are killed in Sweden's bombings - this news article explains a bit more [4] and there is an interesting report from the National Council for Crime Prevention [5] which is actually about shootings among Sweden's criminal element where investigators interview violent Swedish criminals and try to figure out why they committed these crimes. Though the focus is shootings, I expect bombings have similar motiviations (and the news article I linked shares the same sentiments). Basically, the bombings happen to intimidate rival gangs, scare away customers from enemy drug dealers, intimidate store owners into paying "protection" money, things like that. The police are fairly frequent targets of grenade attacks in Sweden too. I have a graph illustrating this somewhere, but for now, just look at Wikipedia's (incomplete) list of grenade attacks in Sweden [6] and ctrl-f for the word "police" and scroll through the page. You'll get an idea for the proportion of attacks which target the police (either police vehicles or buildings). There are also what I'll call "sensational" changes to crime. I don't mean that the changes are super huge or something, but rather I mean that some kinds of crime may have disproportionate impact on public perception because of their nature. I believe, though I can't easily demonstrate this as we can with the statistics above, that there are certain types of crime or behavior which are different from earlier behaviors. Bombings may fall into this category too. This category can be relatively mild, e.g. here[7] is a news story about a small town where a woman is complaining that she is now constantly harassed and afraid to work alone at her bakery because of men harassing her and making her feel unsafe. Other examples are things like mass car burnings, the NYT reported on an incident in 2018[8] where 100 cars were burned in one attack. Other examples of this type of thing are like this incident where two men were attacked, tortured, raped, and buried alive[9]. There are other examples of things like this were victims are beaten up, mutiliated, urinated on, taped, etc. But I hardly think a list of news articles detailing bad things that happened in Sweden would be very productive. The point is, there are sensational crimes in the media too. Maybe things like these are always happening, and maybe Swedish men always harassed small town bakers and waitresses to the point where they feel unsafe in their shops, but that's my intuition or impression from reading about it. Finally, I'll wrap up with a mention of gang rape, which I feel is also part of the sensational category in that it is such a dramatic and horrible crime that it causes an outsize impact on the public consciousness. The Swedish news organization Expressen investigated gang rapes where the gang rapists were convicted between 2016 and 2017. In an article [10] on their investigation they write: "The convicted perpetrators in the investigation are to a very large extent of foreign origin. 32 of them were born abroad. A total of 40 of the 43 convicted perpetrators are either foreign-born or born in Sweden with two immigrant parents." 1 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/crime-statistics.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/... 2 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/swedish-crime-survey.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/... 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden 4 - https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-with-hand-grenades-and-here-s-why https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-wit... 5 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/publications/2019-03-06-shootings-in-criminal-milieux.html https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/... 6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe... 7 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-kopa-henne/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-... 8 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-fires.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-f... 9 - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-radda-att-utsattas-for-valdsdad https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-ra... 10 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-mannen-som-valdtar-tillsammans/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-ma...

jeofken 6y ago

The dissonance between the article about us, and what I clearly see all around me, made me realise that the reporting is not aligned with the truth I know. My point is that if this is the case for topics I know, it’s likely also true for reporting about things foreign to me. Thus I take media with a rock of salt. Have you had the experience of reading in the newspaper about topics which you personally know?