This is a gang war between rivaling drug gangs. Sweden has a serious gang problem and also the highest rate of drug deaths in all of Europe. Something needs to be done.
There have been some good progress recently in resolving murder cases, (which is the most effective way to reduce gang killings), but unfortunately most of the political effort in this area has been to increase jail times and blame immigrants. There are also concerns that the new legal system reforms weaken civil rights protections beyond their gang-combatting purpose. The association by politicians and voters of reducing immigration with combating gangs is inaccurate and unfortunate, as while most of the foot soldiers have immigrant parents, they are often still Swedish citizens, just from a poor, segregated neighborhood. There is not much public discourse on whether the capos and leaders are immigrant, Muslim, etc.
Sweden is very much still clinging to a imagined victory in the war on drugs. In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison, and all Swedish parties in parliament are strictly against drug legalization. In line with solidarity culture, drug users are blamed for financially supporting gang violence.
You are goddam right it does, it's bleeding over, and hired hitmen as young as 14 years old have come from Sweden to Danmark to try to assassinate people. One victim was merely a completely innocent family member living a normal family life here, but was targeted just for being related to some Swedish gangster.
In Sweden they have what we call "Amerikanske tilstande" which translates to something like "conditions like America", which is an expression for just about the worst that can happen. It's pretty common to warn against that here.
Absolutely, back in the days before the 80's "only in America" was often used for something Big and Impressive. Now it's used for something stupid or double standards.
American society used to be considered the pinnacle of the world, but it changed in the 80's, when they began to lower the quality of their society with extreme republican policies:
They failed to acknowledge pollution of the atmosphere is a problem and did absolutely nothing about it despite their wealth. While Europe began to work seriously on ressource and climate sustainability already in the 70's. Today USA has twice the pollution per capita compared to most European countries.
Their healthcare and life expectancy is worse than any EU country.
They have completely failed to get gun violence under control or even try for 5 decades now.
They have extreme poverty despite being among the richest countries in the world.
Their democracy is a flawed first past the post model and only barely a democracy, because it's unable to reasonably represent diverse interests of the population.
Extreme religiousness is widespread and permeates politics as seen with insane abortion restrictions that destroy lives and families.
Corruption is widespread and obvious and even out in the open. Even the supreme court is both corrupt and politicized.
Not an ideal to follow, and it's very sad to see how they have failed to progress or even maintain the quality of the society they had in the 70's.
Ok I’m going to ask the question that the article doesn’t address and also the question that will make all the progressive people on here uncomfortable: how does immigration play into this? Does it? Sweden is known for having a high percentage of foreign-born residents, most of them from outside the EU. It is the frequent punching bag of the extreme right for that reason and for its historically progressive policies. A far right that has been making gains there, as elsewhere. Is this an issue? Has Sweden failed to integrate foreigners who are now increasingly involved in the illegal drug trade and ensuing crime or are these unrelated?
what happened was, the centre-right coalition that made the decision to take in immigrants had no integration plan. these people basically got sent off to places where there was already a higher percentage of immigrants, forming a sort of parallel society.
However, this was about ten years ago, after most of these current gang criminals were born.
the main issue is that due to a decision by a left-wing govt in the 90s, school and youth activity budgets are handled at a local level, meaning poorer areas get much lower quality education, and less recreation. it's a textbook high-criminality recipe.
So, if i got this right, you seem to be implying that immigrants, or at least non-native Swedes as some may have citizenship, don’t know, are implicated in this violence, right? But that the situation today is a result of several policy failures by different governments and it’s not necessarily something to be tied to more recent waves of immigration. It wasn’t clear from the article. I just wanted to understand whether this plays right into the far right playbook once more. Of course poverty is a common factor in crime, but (unfortunately) the topic currently dominating European politics is immigration, and a surge in crime is an almost certain win for the extreme right in this climate.