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Comment by gjsman-1000

7 months ago

Sweden has also had an explosion of organized gang violence; carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...

23 comments

gjsman-1000

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LtWorf  7 months ago

I live in sweden. Police here is extremely incompetent and unwilling to do their jobs.

They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished.

They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed.

Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare.

Llamamoe  7 months ago

> carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.

This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption.

Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it?

CGMthrowaway  7 months ago

> “Socioeconomic factors are what mostly constitute the risks of ending up in crime,” not ethnicity, says Felipe Estrada Dörner, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University

This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well.

I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing :

- increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts

- a youth unemployment problem

- housing price crunch

  • dariosalvi78  7 months ago

    socioeconomic factors and ethnicity are highly correlated. So Prof. Estrada Dörner is probably noting that there is no causation (foreigner -> becomes criminal) but the correlation is high and is due to many factors including segregation and latent racism, so maybe the causal factor is more like discrimination -> creates criminals.

rstuart4133  7 months ago

Thank you.

For others this is the last para of the first link:

> The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC.

So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh.

  • hilios  7 months ago

    >So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars

    No that is not ChatControl, that is just some Swedish thing. Chat Control would make it mandatory for servive providers to scan every single message in the EU for offending material and notify the authorities if anything is detected. It's blatant mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children.

  • ExoticPearTree  7 months ago

    Naive question, but what is the cause of youth violance? Or the increase in violance for that demographic?

    • defrost  7 months ago

      In large part, in Australia, the perception of increased youth crime is a result of increased attention to and policing of youth crime .. across the board things appear to be getting better in the aggregate:

        The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures youth crime across the country by collecting and aggregating police statistics from every state and territory.

  Its data shows the number of youth offenders are lower for every state and territory compared with 2008-09.

  The same thing can be seen when comparing the number of youth offenders per 100,000 people — the rate has gone down, although there has been a slight uptick in some states and territories since COVID pandemic.

      At the same time, however:

        But some states, like Victoria, have recorded a significant rise in youth crime, with its agencies also highlighting the number of incidents involving young offenders — not just the number of youth offenders.

      There's more to be said, some of which appears in (the source of the two quotes above):

      How Australia's states and territories are grappling with youth crime

      https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-31/australian-state-and-...

      Also: 'They've always been scapegoats': Behind Australia's crackdown on youth crime

        Are states like Queensland and Victoria really facing a youth crime "crisis"? Here's what criminologists, political experts and Indigenous advocates say.

      https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australias-crackdown-on-...

    • dariosalvi78  7 months ago

      in Sweden it's segregation and social context. It mostly affects immigrants, mostly children of parents who came here for a better life. They find themselves in poor neighbourhoods, very bad schools, isolated and often discriminated, with no prospects for a "good life". Criminals (adult) know this and push a sort of cool gangsta narrative that some kids find appealing. Kids, mostly adolescents are recruited online, which is why Sweden seems so against encrypted chats, and are commissioned jobs, from selling drugs to executions. This is because kids are mostly impune, and they are easy to convince. Kids being kids, those jobs often end up in a mess.

      It's a dire state of affairs. Sweden is currently one of the most (if not the most?) violent country in Europe if you count gun shootings per capita [1]. The police is unprepared, has few legal means and resources. There are also few officers in general [2].

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-...

nickslaughter02  7 months ago

[flagged]

  • SiempreViernes  7 months ago

    The biggest factor is that the police simply suck at doing their real job but have worked hard at making sure the rank and file doesn't complain in public.

    • LtWorf  7 months ago

      "never complain" is a rule in all sectors in sweden. Makes people feel isolated and makes them think nobody else is facing the same issue as them.

  • LtWorf  7 months ago

    They accepted a lot of migration but then expected immigrants to be content with being extremely poor and with no way to improve their condition and got surprise picachu faces when they decided that crime was an appropriate way since no other way existed.