Sweden, European champion in fatal shootings
Home »world» Sweden, European champion in lethal shootings January 7, 2022
This is, to say the least, unexpected in a traditionally peaceful social democracy such as Sweden, but which for several years has faced inequalities, ghettoization and the revival of the criminal economy. In 2021, there will only be an average of thirty short days when the weapons have not spoken. With 335 shootings, 46 dead and 112 injured, this Nordic country is the European state hardest hit by the settlement.
A “pretty typical” year
Stockholm does not manage to stop this scourge. Over the past four years, the average has been 44 deaths for 325 shootings per year. The trend is now so entrenched that the Stockholm Police’s criminologist Sven Granath talks about a vintage 2021 “Quite typical”. As in previous years, “It is above all about conflicts between young armed men (in 97% of cases, editor’s note) in environments where they try to make a career, in crime. “
The median age of the perpetrators of these murders is 23 years. The country’s major cities, such as Malmö (South), Gothenburg (West) or Stockholm (134 deaths in 2021) are overrepresented in these statistics. Police say 2,500 young people are members of gangs in the capital. Paradoxically, the dismantling of networks of “Yugoslav mafia” in the 1990s partly explains the emergence of smaller, younger, more violent groups. This does not mean that organized crime has been lifted: in a record-breaking global crackdown in June, Europol made it possible to arrest 800 criminals linked to drug or arms trafficking, 150 of them in Sweden.
“Exposed areas”
The authorities draw several challenges from these statistics. They emphasize the need to intervene better “Exposed areas”, while 85% of the authors were born abroad or with an immigrant background. The administration mapped about sixty poor neighborhoods each “Perpetrators affect the local community”. On the other hand, the fight against recidivism had little effect: 76% of the individuals involved in the shootings had already been convicted of crimes.
→ READ. Explosions, murders: Sweden at the time of settlement
In September, residents of the Stockholm suburb, the majority of whom were mothers, came to express their anger before the Riksdag. Gathered in a collective called “National Crisis”, they call for the implementation of an arsenal of 34 measures, including access to summer jobs or enhanced supervision of schools. They refuse to be stigmatized in their district where the police reinforcements did not allow a return to calm, they also ask to harden the tone against drug users in the more affluent districts.
In addition to these figures on lethal settlement of points, Swedish society is still one of the safest in the world: the total number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants is 6.1 globally, 3 in Europe, against 1.1 in Sweden, according to the UN.