2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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Sweden....
Crime gangs in Sweden: What's behind the rise in the use of explosives?
The frequent use of explosives is a relatively recent phenomenon, and criminologists told The Local that the blasts can be seen as part of an overall rise in violence and growing recklessness in these criminal networks.
Amir Rostami, a police superintendent turned sociologist with a focus on criminal gangs, told The Local that so-called 'street gangs' are showing an increased tendency towards violence, and that this violence was becoming more severe when it took place.
"If previously they maybe fired one shot or shot someone in the legs, today it's more about AK47s, using more bullets, hand grenades and explosions that we didn't see before. I'd say that's the biggest shift we see â they're more reckless, they don't seem to care about the consequences," Rostami said.
Fatal shootings linked to criminal gangs have increased from around four per year in the early 1990s to over 40 in 2018. And while the blasts that have taken place in Sweden have caused no fatalities so far this year, they could be seen as a sign that the gangs are unafraid of causing damage and potentially harming people.
No, Sweden, hand grenade attacks arenât an âimageâ problem
In 2018 there were 162 bombings reported to police, and 93 reported in the first five months of this year, 30 more than during the same period in 2018. The level of attacks is âextreme in a country that is not at war,â Crime Commissioner Gunnar Appelgren told SVT last year.
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The use of hand grenades is a purely Swedish phenomenon too, with no other country in Europe reporting their use on such a level, a police manager told Swedish Radio in 2016, a year after attacks first spiked.
The grenades used almost exclusively originate in the former Yugoslavia, and are sold in Sweden for around $100 per piece. But while only three hand grenades were thrown in Kosovo between 2013 and 2014, more than 20 have been used in Sweden every year since 2015.
More broadly, homicide has risen in Sweden, with more than 300 shootings reported last year, causing 45 deaths. Though homicide rates had been in decline since 2002, they again began trending upwards in 2015, as did rapes and sexual assaults, which more than tripled in the last four years.
Of course, 2015 was also the year in which Sweden flung open its doors to more than 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other European country.
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Dagens Nyheter pointed out that 90 percent of shooting perpetrators in Sweden are either first or second generation immigrants.
Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life | The Spectator
Only days after the murder of Karolin Hakim, another young woman fell victim to the gang wars. Eighteen-year-old Ndella Jack was killed as someone fired an automatic weapon into her flat in western Stockholm, probably aiming for her husband, a well-known figure in Stockholmâs gang scene. Less than a week after the murder, associates of Ms Jackâs husband were lured to a middle-class suburb of Stockholm, where they had been promised information about her killer. Shots were fired, missing the targets and hitting instead a taxi driver and a resident in a nearby building. One victim, also a university student, lost his sight in an eye after it was hit by a bullet
Holding Sweden hostage: firearm-related violence
Statistics from the NBHW shows that the number of individuals in Sweden injured by a firearm has greatly increased since 2009. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of individuals that were injured by a firearm increased by 50% [13]. Figure 3 outlines the number of individuals being treated at Swedish hospitals for firearm-related injuries.
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International reports [1, 2], the Swedish police [12,19], and Swedish scholars [3â6,20,21] agree that the main cause for the increase in the rate of firearm-related violence is the presence of many gangs and criminal networks in Sweden.
Although gangs and criminal networks have always existed in Sweden, street gangs flourished in the late 1990s and are today considered to be one of the main security problems in the country [22â24]. Swedish gangs and foremost criminal networks have not only continued to increase, butthey have also become bolder and more violent as can be seen in their use of firearms and explosive devices as their modus operandi [3,6].
Another very important source of the increase of firearm-related violence in Sweden is the easy access to illegal firearms. Although Sweden was, for decades, shielded from firearm-related violence, mostly because of its restrictive gun laws, the easy access to illegal firearms, in addition to the many gangs and criminal networks in the country, is the main reason for the disturbing increase in the countryâs rate of firearm-related violence. According to police reports, there has been a high inflow of illegal weapons into Sweden from the western Balkans [12].
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IN DEPTH: What's behind the rise in gang violence across Sweden?
Honour, debts, and prestige are serving as the pretext for an increasing number of deadly shootings that challenge the ideals of equality and social harmony on which modern Sweden was built.
Stats in Sweden show rise in violence after refugee surge
Murder rose 11 percent in 2016 when compared to 2015's numbers.
Men specifically are killed by gunfire at an increased rate too - up 28 percent in that same time period.
Leading up to 2016, more than a quarter million refugees applied for asylum in Sweden, most fleeing war zones in Muslim-majority countries.
Abstract
Recent reports state that firearm-related violence is increasing in Sweden. In order to understand the trend of firearm-related violence in Sweden with regard to rate, modus operandi (MO) and homicide typology, and for which injuries and causes of death firearm-related violence is responsible, a systematic literature review was conducted. After a thorough search in different databases, a total of 25 studies published in Swedish and English peer-review journals were identified and thus analyzed. The results show that even though knives/sharp weapons continue to be the most common MO in a violent crime in Sweden, firearm-related violence is significantly increasing in the country and foremost when discussing gang-related crimes. Moreover, firearm-related homicides and attempted homicides are increasing in the country. The studies also show that a firearm is much more lethal than a knife/sharp weapon, and that the head, thorax and the abdomen are the most lethal and serious anatomical locations in which to be hit. It is principally the three largest cities of Sweden which are affected by the many shootings in recent years. The police have severe difficulties in solving firearm-related crimes such as homicide and attempted homicide, which is why the confidence and trust for the Swedish judicial system may be decreasing among the citizens. Several reforms have taken place in Sweden in the last few years, but their effect on firearm-related violence remains to be studied.
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4/19/18
Swedenâs violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image
Gang-related gun murders, now mainly a phenomenon among men with immigrant backgrounds in the countryâs parallel societies, increased from 4 per year in the early 1990s to around 40 last year. Because of this, Sweden has gone from being a low-crime country to having homicide rates significantly above the Western European average. Social unrest, with car torchings, attacks on first responders and even riots, is a recurring phenomenon.
Shootings in the country have become so common that they donât make top headlines anymore, unless they are spectacular or lead to fatalities.
News of attacks are quickly replaced with headlines about sports events and celebrities, as readers have become desensitized to the violence.
A generation ago, bombings against the police and riots were extremely rare events. Today, reading about such incidents is considered part of daily life.
3/9/18
Why are young men in Sweden shooting each other?
IT WAS supposed to be a sneaky afternoon cigarette break.
Then a gunman in black appeared and shot 15-year-old Robin Sinisalo in the head.
His older brother Alejandro was shot four times. Robin died immediately on the doorstep of his home in north-west Stockholm. Alejandro was left in a wheelchair for life. Two years later, the boysâ mother, Carolina, says the police still have no leads.
Robinâs fate is increasingly common in Sweden. In 2011 only 17 people were killed by firearms. In 2017 the country had over 300 shootings, leaving 41 people dead and over 100 injured.
The violence mostly stems from street gangs running small-time drug operations in big cities such as Stockholm, the capital, Malmö and Gothenburg.
Gang members have even used hand grenades to attack police stations.
Between 2010 and 2015, people were killed by illegal firearms at the same rate as in southern Italy. Though Sweden is still a relatively peaceful place, this is worrying.
Acquiring a legal gun requires strict screening, but Kalashnikovs from the Yugoslav wars are readily available on the black market. To sweeten the deal, smugglers often throw in hand grenades (there were 43 grenade incidents in Sweden last year). The victims and perpetrators of gang violence are nearly always young men.
But shootings with illegal guns have been rising since the mid-2000s. Most gang members are indeed first- or second-generation immigrantsâ72% of them, according to one report, but they tend not to be new arrivals.
3/3/18
Sweden grenades increasing...
Hand Grenades and Gang Violence Rattle Swedenâs Middle Class
Weapons from a faraway, long-ago war are flowing into immigrant neighborhoods here, puncturing Swedesâ sense of confidence and security.
The countryâs murder rate remains low, by American standards, and violent crime is stable or dropping in many places. But gang-related assaults and shootings are becoming more frequent, and the number of neighborhoods categorized by the police as âmarred by crime, social unrest and insecurityâ is rising. Crime and immigration are certain to be key issues in Septemberâs general election, alongside the traditional debates over education and health care.
Continue reading the main story
Part of the reason is that Swedenâs gang violence, long contained within low-income suburbs, has begun to spill out. In large cities, hospitals report armed confrontations in emergency rooms, and school administrators say threats and weapons have become commonplace. Last week two men from Uppsala, both in their 20s, were arrested on charges of throwing grenades at the home of a bank employee who investigates fraud cases.
An earlier jolt came with the death of Mr. Zuniga, who on Jan. 7 picked up the grenade, which the police believe had been thrown by members of a local gang targeting a rival gang or police officers.
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Affixed to the wall in Mr. Appelgrenâs office in Stockholmâs Police Headquarters is a chart showing the increase in the use of hand grenades. Until 2014 there were about a handful every year. In 2015, that number leapt: 45 grenades were seized by the police, and 10 others were detonated. The next year, 55 were seized and 35 detonated. A modest decrease occurred in 2017, when 39 were seized and 21 were detonated.
Mr. Appelgren has watched the trend apprehensively, calling it an arms race among gangs.
âI think weâre going to see, if we donât stop it, more drive-by shootings with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades,â he said. âThey throw rocks and bottles at our cars, and they trick us in an ambush. When will it happen that they ambush us with Kalashnikovs? Itâs coming.â
https://www.thelocal.se/20170905/why-sweden-has-more-fatal-shootings-per-capita-than-norway-and-germany-malmo
Sweden has in recent years seen a sharp increase in the number of shootings per capita, with research suggesting that the Scandinavian country is statistically on par with southern Italy and parts of Ireland.
In 2016, some 250 shootings (random, fatal and non-fatal) were registered by police in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. In 2014, that number came to 200, indicating that Sweden is experiencing a drastic rise in such incidents.
âWe donât really know why yet, but what we can see is that the increase comes as we also see a rise in gang-related crimes and a growing number of criminal networks,â Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University, told The Local, after Swedish public radio first wrote about new research he is involved in.
One study which is yet to be published suggests that Sweden experienced four to five times as many fatal shootings per capita as Norway and Germany in 2008-2014, two otherwise similar countries. Previous figures have shown that deadly violence in general is going down in Sweden, but gun violence has gone up.
Gerell also singled out Malmö, Swedenâs third-largest city, as the one place where shootings are becoming particularly common.
âMalmö stands out,â he said, noting that the southern city is somewhat more exposed to social problems and poverty in comparison to both the capital and Gothenburg.
âMalmö is also what we describe an âearly adopterâ when it comes to crime. It was the first of the three cities where hand grenade crimes became more commonplace and it was also the place for the establishment of Swedenâs first biker-gangs. We donât know whether this is to do with its proximity to the European continent or not, but it could explain why the trends seem to start there.â
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Gun violence in Sweden surpasses neighboring countries, researchers say - Radio Sweden
New research says Sweden sees more deadly shootings per capita than its closest European neighbors, and the low number of gun crimes solved by police here may be part of the reason why.
Sweden experiences four to five times more fatal shootings per capita than Norway and Germany, according to the ongoing research from Malmö University, Karolinska Hospital and Stockholm University.
The areas with the most shootings are Sweden's major cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The victims as well as the perpetrators also tend to be younger than those in other the countries.
