[cinntaile]

More than any other country... I'm not too sure about that, there are a lot of countries on this planet. What period are you looking at? I assume relative numbers. I'm also skeptical about your other claim that it's all linked to people that came to Sweden through refugee programs. Do you have any sources to back up your claims?

[Gud]

These are basic facts to anyone who has had any experience with Swedish society for hte last years.

If YOU are claiming that the meteoric rise in violence in Sweden is not related to the insane levels of refugees from the middle east that came during the same period, the burden of proof is on YOU.

NO country has gone through the same level of demographic change, unwanted by the Swedes, mind you. The Swedish population was never in favor of this politics and explains the meteoric rise of Sverigedemokraterna, a party founded by literal Nazis(Gustaf Ekström, a Waffen-SS volunteer).

Why this happened, can be discussed in eternity. Probably to understand you should read The New Totalitarians.

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

You can start by checking mug photos.

I have migrated from Sweden and frequently return for work and for family visits. It's still a great country, if you avoid "certain areas". Weird, that these "certain areas" are predominately populated with strangers from a different part of the world who enjoy welfare benefits but either don't want, or can't integrate.

[zenexer]

If they are basic facts, then it should be easy to provide evidence, no? Every time anyone asks for evidence, they’re shot down. That’s unhelpful for public discourse.

[Gud]

The same way I don't have to provide "facts" if I make a statement that the sky is blue, I don't need to provide the "facts" if I claim that the massive influx of mostly male immigrants from dysfunctional, clan based societies, is detrimental to society.

It is the person who claims otherwise who must provide the contrarian evidence.

[dijit]

People don't seem to like responding to facts.

I laid out a lot of primary source citations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48976762

For myself, my favourite restaurant was bombed and a month later four people were shot outside my door (literally on my doorstep, three died): https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/sa-borjade-den-blodi...

Here's some more sources:

BBC, November 2023, "Spread of gang violence wrecks Sweden's peaceful image". Over 60 gun deaths in 2022 (the record), 140+ explosions in 2023, violence spreading out of the low-income vulnerable areas into quiet suburbs, gang leaders directing from Turkey and Serbia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67342368

AP (via Euronews), September 2023 — three killed overnight in shootings and a bombing during the Foxtrot gang feud; the rival factions led by a Swedish-Turkish dual national operating from Turkey. https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/28/3-killed-in-shootings-an...

Al Jazeera, September 2023 — Kristersson calling in the military; police estimate of roughly 30,000 people involved with or tied to gang crime; violence spreading from major urban areas to smaller towns. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/29/swedish-pm-seeks-he...

NBC News, September 2023 — same events, plus the framing that the coalition won the 2022 election partly on the promise to stem gang violence.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sweden-leader-summons-arm...

Reuters, January 2020 — the bombing statistics: 257 bomb attacks reported in 2019, up 60% year on year, concentrated around the ~60 deprived areas police had identified. https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-suffers-surge-bomb-attacks-131...

Euronews, September 2023 — Kristersson: "No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this." https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/29/sweden-pm-asks-military-...

[inigyou]

> People don't seem to like responding to facts.

This kind of statement isn't allowed here.

[dijit]

Why? It does seem to be true.

People love responding to interpretations or theories, but properly reasoned and cited comments tend to go unanswered.

Stating facts is not against HN guidelines, even if it’s against your preferred position.

[jb1991]

I did a quick search, among all of the articles are people even doing their thesis work on this problem: https://www.gu.se/sites/default/files/2025-10/The%20ripple%2...

[cinntaile]

> Sweden has, more than any other country, faced an astounding and shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime, with shootings in the middle of cities and cafés, all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs.

You claimed two things that I took issue with: The rise of intense violence and organized crime is higher than in any other country. All those crimes are linked to people openly accepted through its refugee programmes.

A student thesis about "The Ripple Effect of Gang Violence" does not back up these claims.

I am well aware that Sweden has had an increase in intense violence and organized crime in recent years, but that is not what you claimed. You were more specific.

[surgical_fire]

You use a very vague language to tie violence in Sweden to immigrants.

Then you link a study without really going much about how the study supports your claims, as if that is evidence of what you suggest.

You are gesturing to one thing - "there's a study on gang violence in Sweden" - and presenting it as evidence of another thing - "immigrants are to blame for gang violence".

So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing; I suppose you did not (or if you did you are hypocritically linking it hoping no one else does:

> One of the most consistent findings in research on societal responses to a collective threat is the tendency for the majority population to seek culpability, often by attributing blame to an outgroup perceived to be associated with the perpetrators (Frey, 2022; Ramirez and Kim, 2024). This process, known as scapegoating, is a psychological coping mechanism in which individuals displace frustration or anxiety onto an entire group (Frey, 2022).

And this, buddy, is precisely what you are doing.

[dijit]

> So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing

Huh, so did I... but clearly one of us didn't read it thoroughly enough.

The first sentence of the abstract says the surge in shootings is "disproportionately involving young men with immigrant backgrounds".

Page 2: people with an immigrant background are 80% of shooting victims and 64% of perpetrators (citing Brå).

You seem to just skip to the theory section page 13 regarding scapegoating.

To be fair, the original claim was overcooked in two places. "All linked" should be "most", and "more than any other country" needs a qualifier:

1) Brå compared Sweden with 22 other European countries. Sweden is the only one with a continuous rise in gun homicide since 2005

https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-05-26-gun-h...

2) the OECD's own conclusion was that 2014–15 Sweden saw the largest per-capita inflow of asylum seekers ever recorded in an OECD country

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/international-migration...

3) Brå's register study puts the relative risk of being a crime suspect at 2.5x for the foreign-born and 3.2x for the second generation, with excess risk remaining after controlling for age, sex, income and education

https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-08-25-regis...

https://bra.se/download/18.45e4b8e192705389a34c2b/1729515966...

The most dangerous, then, are "Swedish" persons with a migrant background, born and raised in Sweden- I'm not sure how to answer that, but that's really uncomfortable.

4) None of this is a fringe reading. Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrat, then PM) said in 2022 that integration had failed and produced parallel societies feeding the gangs... Kristersen as PM (right wing) said the same thing a year later.. so it has some broad bipartisan agreement.

https://www.euronews.com/2022/04/29/us-sweden-immigration

https://www.government.se/speeches/2023/09/prime-minister-ul...

[belorn]

For non-Swedes, all the links with the domain "bra.se" is the government department for prevention of crime, and as part of that role has been given the objective from the government to collect crime statistic. They provide data, conclusions and advice the government on how to effectively combat crime. They also have direct access to police and court databases in order to achieve their objectives.

They are the official source for crime statistics in Sweden.

[Gud]

Should be noted that for years(decades?) they didn't do any statistics regarding the heritage of criminals because of the taboo, while a massive influx of migrants was coming.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/svt-s-rundringning-visar-...

[jb1991]

I find it fascinating that people in this thread are arguing against raw government crime statistics and are asking for further evidence of this problem.

[g-b-r]

Where? I didn't see anyone contest official crime statistics?

[constantius]

The claim made was that all crime is linked to refugees.

We can agree that the 'all' part was just the original commenters own biases, but that 'refugee' part is still unfounded based on your quotes.

Refugees are a small minority of immigrants (historically around 10%, don't know what it is in Sweden). The quotes you cite are about immigrants, and the few nationalities mentioned are Turkey and Serbia: neither is a country where refugees originate (except maybe LGBT people, but I'd be very surprised if Sweden is in the thrall of gay Turks...).

So the assertion about immigrant backgrounds seems to hold, but nothing says it's related to refugees, otherwise the large majority of these criminals would be Afghan, Syrian, Eritrean, etc., which doesn't seem to be the case.

[surgical_fire]

I did read the study.

The problem is that those statistics are doing something sensible. There are uncomfortable statistics related to immigrants, and your point #4, the thing about integration not being properly done creating parallel societies is a real problem that can and should be addressed properly.

But that's not what the person I replied to was doing - "all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs"

No, the study says that a foreign-born person is "2.5x" more likely to be a "crime suspect". That can mean a lot of things (e.g.: how many of them were actually convicted). Also, they are minority. Presuming all of them are convicted, it's still a minority that has about double the odds of being criminals. The logical consequence is that a lot of Swedish people are criminals if there's an explosion of gang violence.

Maybe the problem is the Swedish approach to guns? I live in a country that has a shitton of immigrants and is not seeing this surge of gun violence.

You see, we can discuss this properly without engaging in ethnonationalist bullshit.

[dijit]

We can, but there is always a large amount of people who struggle to articulate their emotions and would prefer to label and condemn- true of basically every “side” on any topic from what I can tell.

This has been especially true in Sweden, and I’ve seen it, the way people talk about migration is: if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

This seems to have taken the sting out of supporting actual Nazi parties (SD)…

So while you and I can debate the facts, the larger trend in society is not due to us as individuals, its how much society permits this dialogue to happen at all before trying to shut it down with bad faith and unreasoned statements.

[surgical_fire]

That's the curse of democracy, and I don't say this as a way to tarnish it. I prefer living in a democracy anyway.

We can't expect everyone to be informed and educated. I perceive most people as being guided by basic emotions - Mostly their fears.

> if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

Part of the problem I perceive on the left was unwillingness, for a long time, to engage with it at all. For a long time in the past decade, and in many ways to this day, the whole immigration discussion was dominated by people that were just annoyed that there's too many brown people walking around nowadays.

And that's how you poison the well of discussion. If you accept immigrants, you should expect people to behave in a certain way. In many ways a visa is a privilege, not a right. But how can you even start this conversation when a mouth breather will come out of his hole branding about claims about all crimes being tied to immigrants?

Honestly, this sort of sucks.

[jb1991]

First, I’m not your buddy, and that kind of condescending language doesn’t really help the discussion. Second, I assumed these issues were common knowledge since the frequent shootings in broad daylight that have rocked Sweden in the last couple of years have been from immigrant gang violence, and I mistakenly assumed everyone was aware of these news reports. But perhaps it’s only most obvious here in Europe.

There are other comments in this thread that are expressing the situation better than I am.