[ardaoweo]

Yep. If the Swedish government really cared about children, they would do something to stop the massive underage gang violence problem the country has. 12 year olds being used as hitmen for drug gangs is not normal, yet that's the reality.

[estomagordo]

You talk as if this is a problem that is easily solved. Of course government wish this could he solved.

A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion "they do nothing to stop underage violence", it's probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.

[LtWorf]

Well they will send brochures to schools now. That will fix it for sure I guess...

[estomagordo]

A remark as staggeringly strange as it is common.

Yes, the police and social services has compiled written information that they want to share with parents of at-risk children.

This seems a strange thing to ridicule.

[LtWorf]

We'll see next year how this strategy failed I guess.

[LtWorf]

Ah I heard today in the (swedish) news that they were advising parents to check which apps the kids are using.

The main issue being "an encrypted messenger". So whatsapp=gang… unclear if telegram is ok since it's normally not e2ee.

I am skeptical this will achieve anything useful.

[okr]

gangs of 12 year old roaming the swedish streets? you sure, it's not monty python playing in your head?

[zx10rse]

Ignorance is bliss. It literally takes 4 sec to perform a search and find plenty of such cases - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PXZxaKMl9Y (Sky News Investigates: Sweden's deadly gang war)

"How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?" "Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there's a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. "

[bryanrasmussen]

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/SWE/swe...

things tend to be relative, hence statistics are a thing. The gun murder capital of Europe without some hard data as to what that means sounds a bit like the radiation poisoning center of Antarctica, gang members as young as 14 can definitely be increasingly doing things if before they started increasing there were zero gang members below 14 using explosives etc.

Another problem is just taking what the police say as being "true", for example the police say there are 62000 people in Stockholm (a city of slightly over 920000) "linked" to criminal gangs - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-has-around-62000... this article uses the word linked twice, in the title linked to criminal gangs, and later in the article "the authorities have struggled for years to contain violence linked to organised crime." I wonder if they have 62000 people who are violent in their linkage, somehow I doubt it but this seems to be the impression.

Hey, I bet there is a problem, how big of a problem, probably not as big as these news stories imply. Why not? Well because if I had a really big nasty problem I wouldn't just imply it, I would lay it out, plenty of engagement to go around, but if my engagement could benefit from exaggerating the problem then I will imply instead of stating plainly.

At any rate more than 6% of the population of Stockholm is currently not involved in a violent gang war which one might infer from the reportage.

[bryanrasmussen]

actually in that article from Reuters it says there were 62 deadly shootings in Sweden in the year.

Which is hilarious because it also says there are 62000 gang linked people in Stockholm.

One thing you are always told to watch out for is big round numbers in stats, because it is pretty unlikely it is just 62000 and not 62119 or something (not a big stats guy, just something I've read)

At any rate the article says 62000 linked to gangs, and 62 killings (pretty weird that). So a 0.1% violence among the linked to gangs people (if all the murders were linked to gangs), but out of the full pop of Sweden 10,490,000 this is a 0.000591% rate of murder, the U.S as a whole has 0.0075 murder rate right now.

Zoom in on parts of the U.S you get a much higher murder rate - https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-...

like I said everything is relative, and Sweden does not have as big a problem as the reporting lets on.

[zx10rse]

I love responses like this. Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.

If you are not an inmate I will assume that you are a free person living in a western society. Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm, lets just say for the statistics you are going to live in a slightly not so friendly neighbourhood where the lying police said that it is an area populated with predominantly 14 years old gang members, now since police by your own words cannot be trusted we will assume that their information is not correct and the area is perfectly fine and safe.

Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur? Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.

Now you can choose to deny reality and look away, but the good thing about reality is, that it is just like gravity it just hits you sometimes.

I don't know if your PM have to call in the army to help with gang related crimes the situation seem pretty bad to me, again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.

[underbiding]

These kind of responses (yours, zx10rse) are the absolute worst appeals to anecdote and bias I can think of. Someone actually comes along with a logical argument so you just give up and say "yeah well uhhh I'd like to see you try". Sad.

[bryanrasmussen]

>I love responses like this.

I know we're supposed to think everybody is being honest here, but I don't think you do love responses like this.

>Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.

right, to get the rates of deaths by violence, rates of death by gang related violence, compare that to other parts of the world with gang related violence etc. etc. I mean I agree, everybody knows how to do statistics!

>Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm,

I stand corrected, not everybody knows how to do statistics.

>again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.

but anyway that is not how statistics works.

>Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.

You know the answer as to whether I am willing to move to a part of Stockholm the police identify as high crime from "a western society" based on a hacker news argument with someone who evidently doesn't know how statistics work?

Amazing!!

>Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur?

If "with just 5% probability to get executed" then the answer to "how likely is this event to occur?" is 5%. However as this is "by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times" then that would mean 5 out of every 100 times somebody walks home they get executed.

Given the earlier number of people in the article linked with crime was 62000, and assuming that everybody walks home at least once per day and 5% of people walking home get executed by 14 year olds it follows that in your world 3100 people per day are getting executed by 14 year olds in Stockholm, that seems a lot. I mean in 30 days that would be more than the number of people linked with crime!

If that were true I don't think the EU would just be proposing to help inmates in their prisons but might be sending peace keeping forces in to help.

[bryanrasmussen]

obviously there are a number of points where I've fudged the numbers here, as I don't care much, for example with 3100 being killed the 5% of 62000 would be decreasing as it would no longer be 62000 - but I will leave that to other people to figure out.

[defrost]

"Sky News Investigates" is synonomous with Murdoch Press grossly exaggerates small issues to be world threatening edge of the seat click baiting prequels to the coming apocolypse.

At least in Australia and in the UK. Maybe they're a moderate and balanced presenter of truth on the ground in Sweden.

Seems unlikely.

I'm fully aware this reads as "attacking the source" but there's no rabid attack intended here just a frank pragmatic assessment of what "Sky News Investigates" actually means.

[codedokode]

I am curious, is the rise of violent crime somehow linked with migration from Asia and Africa or it is a completely unrelated issue and most of the criminals come from families who have lived in Sweden for many generations?

[johnyzee]

It's largely second generation immigrants (yes, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, since that's where most immigration - in the shape of refugees - comes from).

And take it from someone who actually lives in the area (as opposed to HN speculators): YES it has gotten significantly worse over the last five years (having already been bad for decades), and YES 14 year old hitmen with explosives and automatic weapons are now an actual thing, not just a couple of incidents.

The politics of this is so inflamed, which makes it harder to discuss, much less solve the problems. I am not against immigration per se, from any given country. But right now, it is obviously causing major problems that need to be handled with extreme prejudice.

[jaakl]

Sweden is building now new prison for underage and lacks thousands of seats for inmates. Other countries are talking about renting their spare capacities to them.

[wordofx]

Unsure why my comment was flagged. If you want to see how much of the newspapers are censored in Sweden you’re free to go live there for a while, and witness the crime that happens and lack of support from police or media attention when the crime is committed by anyone who isn’t white and Swedish.

[carlosjobim]

Open a newspaper when you find the time. Even government aligned mainstream media is reporting on it.