Sweden’s new epidemic: clan-based crime

‘We have an obvious problem,’ admitted the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven recently. He was referring not to the Covid pandemic, but to a summer of crime that has left even jaded Swedes reeling in disbelief. There are regular bombings, hand grenade attacks and shootings. Young men are killing each other at a horrific rate — ten times that of Germany. The feeling is growing that the government has completely lost control. Yet, while Löfven has finally acknowledged the existence of the problem, he still seems in denial about its true nature.

Last month in Botkyrka, south of Stockholm, a 12-year-old girl walking her dog was killed by a stray bullet from a gang shooting — and in a TV interview her friends explained that shootings are simply part of daily life in their neighbourhood. One child said that she hears gunfire from her bedroom window almost every night. And this is perhaps what’s most shocking for older Swedes: how resigned the children in these areas are; how much they’ve grown used to the violence.

It is all too much for Mats Löfving, the deputy national police chief, who earlier this month decided to speak plainly about the nature of the criminals he and his colleagues are fighting. There are at least 40 family-based criminal networks — or clans — in Sweden, he confirmed: immigrants who came to the country ‘solely for the purpose of organising and systematising crime’. According to Löfving, they make their money through drug-trafficking and extortion and ‘have a great capacity for violence’.

The interview was a bombshell. The Prime Minister has always tried to talk about crime as a socioeconomic problem — and he stuck to this line in response to Löfving, saying that ‘I do not want to link crime to ethnicity’.