Sweden is postponed
INN SEN MAJ About thirty young men, most of them from African or Middle Eastern minorities, started fighting in a square in Hjallbo, a suburb of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. Members of rival gangs appear to have started the scrap yard over the theft of a moped. Two days later, a man was shot in the head in a nearby grocery store, thought to be an act of revenge for the battle in the gangway. Then a policeman was shot in Biskopsgarden, another suburb of the city. A few days later, a man was murdered in a hair salon in Frolunda, another suburb. To complement this news of the latest criminal violence, two young children were lucky enough to survive last week after being caught in the crossfire by another gang shooting, this time in Visattra, on the outskirts of Stockholm, the capital.
For the past 15 years, Sweden has had Europe’s highest death toll by shooting, according to a new report from the country’s National Council for Crime Prevention. Analyze data on 22 European countries from Eurostat and U.NThe World Health Organization, Klara Hradilova-Selin, researcher at the Council, reckoned that Sweden came second after Croatia between 2014 and 2017. But 2018, preliminary data indicate that Sweden had risen to the top. Most of the victims are men between 20 and 29. Sweden’s murder rate by firing is two and a half times the European average.
Such violence is always driven by illegal drugs and bad feelings between unemployed, marginalized young men and the police. The latest immigrants, many of them Somalis, have not been able to integrate. The Syrian migrant crisis in 2015 has led to more ghettoization. In Hjallbo, 70% of the inhabitants were born abroad. Many of them, especially young men, are scratching for welfare benefits and the black market. Shooting has become a common way for gangs to solve their differences.
Some analysts also blame excessive centralization over the past decade for the reduced number of police officers serving on the streets of Sweden’s uglier suburbs, despite higher police numbers overall. In some districts where immigrants are prominent, community policing has broken down and allowed deadly gangs to take over. In 1980, the Gothenburg police solved 80% of all murders. Nowadays, the figure is a dismal 20%.
This article was published in the European section of the print edition under the heading “Guns galore”
