Sweden: Gangs and Explosions

I was talking with a friend who is a native Swede. He hasn't lived in the country for years, however. I decided to ask him if he followed the news about Sweden and what he might know about the increasing grenade attacks. He asked if I was getting my news from right wing news sources. Though some of the news reports I read do come from right wing news sources, not all of it does. Here's a couple articles that would hardly be considered right wing:

BBC has the following to say:

Swedish police are dealing with unprecedented levels of attacks, targeting city centre locations too. The bomb squad was called to deal with 97 explosions in the first nine months of this year.

. . . This category of crime was not even logged prior to 2017. Then, in 2018, there were 162 explosions and in the past two months alone the bomb squad have been called to almost 30.

. . . Police say the criminals involved are part of the same gangs behind an increase in gun crime, often connected to the drugs trade. Sweden saw 45 deadly shootings in 2018, compared with 17 in 2011. 



Sweden's population is around 10 million. Los Angeles county has a population of around 10 million. So I figured I'd see what I could find about Los Angeles. Via the LAPD website:

How many calls per year does the Bomb Squad handle? The Bomb Squad has responded to over 1000 bomb related calls for service per year for the past 4 years. Of those 1000+ calls, approximately 22 percent actually involved live devices that had to be rendered safe, live devices that have already functioned, live military ordnance, or other illegal explosive devices.

Are fireworks considered explosive devices? Fireworks are considered explosive devices, and they are extremely dangerous. Every year numerous children and adults are injured or burned as a result of playing with fireworks. Fireworks are dangerous and illegal within the city limits of Los Angeles. 

I couldn't find any detailed statistics, but it looks like around 220 live devices are found in Los Angeles during any given year. But then you have to assume that a portion of those are related to fireworks and that many of those devices never explode in the first place. In Sweden, 162 explosions occurred in 2018. Since the U.S. is probably considered a much more violent place than Sweden, I think we can safely say that Sweden does have an issue here.

The Local in Sweden has the following:

A major explosion in Linköping earlier this year was described as 30 to 40 times as big a charge as previous attacks, with police saying it was a "miracle" no one was seriously hurt. Police in Malmö have previously told The Local that blasts in the Skåne city are becoming more powerful over time . . . Police have reported a recent trend to use handmade devices using plastic explosives, which cause more powerful blasts than the hand grenades dating back to the Balkan conflicts and the imported bangers which were typically used in earlier years.

. . . Most of the explosions have targeted empty buildings or vehicles, suggesting that causing harm to people is not the intention. 

. . . In fact, only one in ten cases involving explosions were resolved by police in 2018, and this low clearance rate can partly be explained by a culture of silence in criminal environments, making it hard for police to get evidence from victims and potential witnesses. 

At what point does a targeted building that is assumed to be empty actually have people in them, which results in an all out gang war? Also, as explosive devices get more powerful, the greater the chance that someone is killed as the range of destruction expands.

Reading the article had me thinking about how these more dangerous devices might be related to returning ISIS fighters. Earlier this year, I took the following quote from The Local:

None of the 150 Swedish citizens who have returned home after joining the terror group Islamic State have been convicted of crimes committed while abroad. While some European countries are investigating all returning foreign fighters, Sweden is not . . . In Sweden, however, suspicion of a specific crime is required in order to initiate a preliminary investigation. If there is no concrete information to work off, the police's ability to access any digital evidence, for example in returning foreign fighters’ phones, decreases drastically.