For many Germans, Sweden is a land of longing with an Astrid Lindgren idyll, Ikea ball pit and cinnamon rolls. But the EU country has a problem with escalating gang crime.
Stockholm – First a policeman was shot, then two playing children were hit by bullets, after all, in recent days there have been more and more shots in Kristianstad, Linköping and elsewhere. Sweden, the Scandinavian country has long admitted, has a serious problem with gang crime.
This applies above all to the big cities and their suburbs, but also beyond Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The police are particularly concerned about children and young people who are drawn into criminal circles. “The power of the gangs over the young must be broken,” demands the newspaper “Sydsvenskan”.
Who are these gangs and what do they want to achieve? The crime reporter Lasse Wierup tried to explain this in 2020 in a book with the title “Gangsterparadiset” – the gangster’s paradise. In it, he sheds light on how the country, considered so peaceful, could develop into a scene of gang crime, shootings and deliberately caused explosions.
According to Wierup, there are now at least 350 criminal constellations in Sweden, from rockers to ethnically related gangs to locally active networks, all of which are fighting, among other things, to influence the drug market. That is more than three times as many as in 2010.
“We may not have seen this coming”
Right at the beginning, the reporter for the newspaper “Dagens Nyheter” quoted a statement by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. “We may not have seen it coming,” admitted the public at the end of 2019. This sentence resonated for a long time, as in the opinion of the opposition and many media outlets it showed a certain helplessness on the part of the government in dealing with criminals.
What happened in Sweden before and since this statement does not sound like Bullerbü, but more like the Bronx. There have been repeated explosions in recent years, often in the entrance areas of apartment buildings, sometimes in front of public buildings. Only rarely is anyone injured, but all the more horror is sown.
For some time now, the detonations have become less frequent – which does not mean that Sweden’s roads have become more peaceful. On the contrary: Given the innumerable conflicts between the gangs, there were around 180 shootings between January and July – on average, bullets were fired somewhere in Sweden almost every day. The level of the two prior-year periods was similarly high.
Many dead and injured
This has serious consequences: 25 dead and 53 injured are recorded in the acts in the first seven months of 2021. A month and a half ago, a 33-year-old policeman was shot dead in the street in Gothenburg when he was talking to several people at night in the problematic district of Biskopsgården.
It is believed that the officer was not specifically targeted. The same applies to two children who were shot in the Stockholm suburb of Huddinge in mid-July. It was the next case in which children got caught between the gang fronts: A nightly shot near a gas station in Botkyrka near Stockholm had killed a twelve-year-old girl in August 2020. Sweden was shocked.
“We have observed a trend that it has become more common for outsiders to be affected by this type of violence,” said criminologist Manne Gerell recently on the SVT broadcaster. Previously, two younger men and a woman between 60 and 70 were shot and seriously injured in the city of Kristianstad.
Offenders are getting younger and younger
Sagittarians are mostly young men and, increasingly, teenagers. “The average perpetrator is around 20 years old and lives in a so-called endangered area,” says crime reporter Wierup of the German Press Agency – in German this “utsatt område” would most likely be described as a problem area. “The new trend, however, is that minors are playing an increasingly important role.” One reason for this: The police have succeeded in catching older criminals by decrypting the EncroChat app.
In the case of the policeman who was killed, a 17-year-old was arrested. Even after the crime in Kristianstad, three minors were initially suspected, but they were later released. A youngster was shot a few days later in Linköping after a 20-year-old had been shot two and a half months earlier.
Children and young people are also exploited by the gangs for hiding and transporting drugs and firearms, as information from the decrypted chats showed. “I’m actually pretty worried about our future,” said the local police chief in Sollentuna in northern Stockholm, Christoffer Bohman, in the SVT.
Low clearance rate
What’s Sweden doing wrong? According to Wierup, one of the most important explanations for the escalating gang violence is the low clear-up rate. “The short answer is that the price of living a gangster life in Sweden is often low,” he says. “Many young people, not least those who have immigrated from other countries, discover that one can commit many crimes without being sentenced to a severe sentence.”
Swedish legislation comes from another time in this regard, says Wierup. In the end, the Reichstag in Stockholm saw that something had to be done, and several stricter laws were put in place. Löfven’s criticized government presented a 34-point plan in mid-June to get the gangs under control. “In Sweden everyone should be safe, no matter where you live,” it says.
The problem for crime reporter Wierup: The criminal networks have long since established themselves in the lost years – “breaking” them, as Löfven has often promised, is therefore not an easy task for the understaffed police. dpa
