This is to say the least unexpected in a traditionally peaceful social democracy like Sweden, but which for several years has come up once morest inequalities, ghettoization and the resurgence of the criminal economy. In 2021, there will have been on average only thirty short days when the guns have not spoken. With 335 shootings, 46 dead and 112 injured, this Nordic country is the European state most affected by the settling of scores.
A “fairly typical” year
Stockholm is failing to stop this scourge. Over the past four years, the average has stood at 44 deaths for 325 shootings per year. The trend is now so entrenched that Stockholm police criminologist Sven Granath talks regarding a 2021 vintage “Fairly typical”. As in previous years, “It is above all regarding conflicts between young armed men (in 97% of cases, Editor’s note) in environments where they are trying to make a career, in delinquency. “
The median age of the perpetrators of these homicides is 23 years. The country’s large cities, such as Malmö (South), Gothenburg (West) or Stockholm (134 dead in 2021) are over-represented 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 appearance of smaller, younger, more violent groups. This does not mean that organized crime has been uprooted: in a record global crackdown in June, Europol made it possible to arrest 800 criminals linked to drug or arms trafficking, including 150 in Sweden.
“Vulnerable areas”
The authorities draw several challenges from these statistics. They underline the need to intervene better in the “Vulnerable areas”, while 85% of the authors were born abroad or from an immigrant background. The administration mapped around sixty poor neighborhoods where “Offenders influence the local community”. On the other hand, the fight once morest recidivism produced little effect: 76% of individuals involved in shootings had already been convicted of crimes.
→ READ. Explosions, homicides: Sweden at the time of settling scores
In September, residents of the Stockholm suburbs, the majority of whom were mothers, came to express their anger in front of Parliament. Gathered in a collective called “National Crisis”, they ask for the implementation of an arsenal of 34 measures, including access to summer jobs or reinforced supervision of schools. Refusing to be stigmatized in their district where the police reinforcements did not allow a return to calm, they ask at the same time to harden the tone once morest the drug users of the more affluent districts.
Beyond these figures on deadly settling of scores, Swedish society remains one of the safest in the world: the total of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants is 6.1 globally, 3 in Europe , once morest 1.1 in Sweden, according to the UN.
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