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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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How Peaceful Sweden Became Europe’s Gun-Murder Capital

This link is probably paywalled for most, so some of the salient points:

"Turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities, have resulted in a gun-homicide rate approximately 2½ times the European average, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

With 62 people shot dead last year, up from 45 in 2021, Sweden’s overall homicide rate is about one-sixth of the U.S.’s. But in a European context, it is extraordinary. Stockholm’s gun-murder rate was roughly 30 times higher per capita than London’s.

Perpetrators are becoming younger, and are also resorting to increasingly violent tactics such as throwing hand grenades and placing bombs, injuring a growing number of bystanders, including children.

Because most shootings in Sweden take place among individuals from migrant backgrounds, they have fueled a surge of right-wing populism. In the 2022 election, the Sweden Democrats, a party that has roots in Nazism and blames Sweden’s liberal migration policies for the violence, gained more than 20% of the votes to become the country’s second-largest. Today it rejects Nazism and white nationalism on its platform.

The new center-right government has promised to tighten migration policies, double sentences for offenses committed in “gang environments,” widen the use of electronic surveillance and expel more criminals who aren’t Swedish citizens.

“Compared internationally, we have had a much laxer criminal law. And we have now lost control over the situation,” said Daniel Bergström, an adviser to the Swedish minister of justice.

Experts, however, say there is no simple explanation for the violence.

Nikoi Djane, a former gang member turned criminologist, said authorities had failed to help refugees integrate into society, instead segregating them from society in housing estates with few job opportunities or treatment for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The perpetrators have a responsibility, but they are also victims of their circumstances,” Djane said.

Manne Gerell, an associate professor at Malmö University with expertise in organized crime, said the problem was caused by poor integration and exacerbated by years of insufficient response from authorities, police and politicians.

Today, an estimated 75% to 80% of deadly shootings remain unsolved, and the low risk of getting caught has prompted a growing number of youths to kill for bounties issued by gang leaders, said Salihu, the crime expert.

It might also be helpful to look at this article in conjunction with this Free Press article on violence in Sweden: Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden.

At least on its face, this situation has a clear cause (migration from non-Western countries) and a simple solution (stop accepting migrants and remove many of the migrants that are already in Sweden), but to even state these facts gets you labeled a "right-wing populist" (nice of WSJ to omit the customary "far right populist").

I do see where the Left is coming from here. Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades. But I also think a given community has the right to maintain the integrity of its society and culture. That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.

One must always take claims re supposed crime surges with a bit of a grain of salt; neither this data nor this data indicates that there is much of a crisis.

But I also think a given community has the right to maintain the integrity of its society and culture.

That seems to be a bit of a sleight of hand; your evidence is re crime rate, which is very different than cultural integrity. Concerns re "cultural integrity" usually refer to concerns about the culture of immigrants per se, rather than the effect one way or the other of immigrants on crime, etc.

Sweden has a population of 10.5M. Eyeballing the numbers on country of origin, it appears to have about 500k of the migrants people are concerned about, i.e. about 5% of the population (from much lower numbers on a roughly 2010-2020 time scale).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

More plausibly, since this is a fairly recent issue, the complaint is probably about the "Syrians". Note that Europe faced a flood of immigrants claiming to be Syrian after their civil war but it's widely believed that many are not.

Assuming they are 5x as violent as natives - along the lines of African Americans in the US - that would result in a 10% increase in crime overall. That would not show up in the graphs you chose to post.

I did notice one graph you did not choose to post which shows a 5x increase in sex crimes over the period of "Syrian" migration.

https://bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/sexual-offences.html

In any case "there are very few migrants so even if they do lots of crimes per capita they don't do many in total" is a poor argument for importing more.

I did notice one graph you did not choose to post which shows a 5x increase in sex crimes over the period of "Syrian" migration.

OP talked specifically about murders, so that is what I looked at.

In any case "there are very few migrants so even if they do lots of crimes per capita they don't do many in total" is a poor argument for importing more.

Perhaps, but I did not make that argument. But that is a strawman, since surely the arguments for increasing immigration relate to the benefits thereof, to Sweden and to the migrants, rather than to the costs.

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