Sweden: Crime in Malmo

Around a year ago, I wrote some blog posts looking into crime and the city of Malmo. Though crime rates in Sweden hardly compare to that of the United States, I thought it would be interesting to look considering that the Swedish Democrats were making political gains and Malmo was often named as a city filled with growing crime. At the time, it did appear that murder rates were on the uptick. Interestingly, earlier this year, crime rates were reported for the city and crime had fallen to a 17 year low.

Per The Local in Sweden (January 18, 2019):

With recent high-profile shootings, you'd think Malmö was in the middle of a crime wave . . . According to Sweden's crime statistics agency Brå, the number of crimes reported in Malmö dropped more than 10 percent in 2018 to 53,192, a level last seen in 2001, when there were 75,000 fewer people living in the city . . . According to Brå's annual statistics, the number of attempted murders reported in Malmö dropped by nearly half, from 100 in 2017 to 55 in 2018, the lowest number since 2013.

A more recent article from The Local in Sweden appears to largely back this up:

People living in the city were slightly more likely than those living elsewhere in Sweden to report being victims of a crime.



By "slightly," we're talking an average for Sweden of 28% while the average in Malmo is 29%. Of course, Malmo's reputation might be driven by two specific districts:

In the district of Fosie, a full 65 percent of respondents said they would feel "unsafe" or "very unsafe" to be out alone late at night in their area, the highest proportion of any district in Sweden. For Rosengård, another district with a reputation for being troubled, the share was 60 percent. 

An article from Quillette takes a more dire view for Sweden:

But this didn’t stem the tide: some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone—an average of more than one every other day and an increase over the same period in 2018, a year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week. . . . There has been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight. Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as ”criminal environments” last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation. In contrast, neighbouring Norway has less than three. Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average. And systematic witness intimidation, paired with a code of silence in the country’s socio-economically weak immigrant areas, has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle.

So Quillette does a comparison with Norway. Interestingly, the graph the writer shows indicates that grenade attacks peaked in 2016 while the above quote argues that 2018 was a record number for explosions and that 2019 is on pace to exceed that number.