Posted on 02/25/2017 6:35:06 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The U.S. media debate has been misleading, but the biggest problem is that the Swedish political establishment doesn’t want to know the answer.
Last Saturday, another controversy erupted involving the now familiar mix of President Trump, the media, and immigration.
In a speech, Trump riffed on a Fox News segment he’d seen on immigration and crime in Sweden, causing much confusion. The situation hardly improved as journalists and pundits mostly unfamiliar with the topic rushed to explain the finer points of Swedish crime statistics.
So, what is the situation actually like? Nightmarish rape capital of Europe or a safe welfare state unfairly maligned by far-right agitators?
Sweden has a growing problem with crime that is linked to immigration, but the Fox News segment was sensationalistic. As with many exaggerated reports from Sweden in foreign right-wing outlets, the tone of the reporting implies there has been a large crime wave brought about by the recent migration crisis. This is misleading.
Refugees who arrived during the migration crisis are too few in number to explain much of Swedish crime trends. Sweden’s crime-heavy immigrant neighborhoods emerged gradually through the accumulated effects of many decades of immigration.
Several types of crimes such as gang shooting, arson, and sexual assault have increased in Sweden, but other categories such as assault, car thefts, and property crimes have decreased. The increase in sexual assault and violent crime is not as spectacular a development as the Fox News segment made it out to be. Even in Swedish immigrant enclaves, criminality is still fairly mild compared with U.S. crime hubs. Last year the famously multicultural Swedish city of Malmö had a homicide rate of 3 per 100,000, far lower than the 28 per 100,000 rate in Chicago.
In their response to Donald Trump, the Swedish government has pointed out that the homicide rate in Sweden is lower now than in 1990. We should nevertheless note that the homicide rate has decreased in almost every Western country since 1990, owing to social reasons, changes in attitudes, and, in part, medical advances that save the lives of more crime victims. The homicide rate in Sweden has declined less than in the United States, Western Europe, and other Nordic countries, and has increased again the last few years.
Between 1990 and 2015, the homicide rate in Sweden declined from 1.3 to 1.1 per 100,000. This drop is less than that in Western Europe as a whole, where the homicide rate declined from 1.3 to 0.6 in 2013, the latest year reported by the World Health Organization.
In Finland, the homicide rate declined from 3.2 to 1.3 during the same period, and in Norway from 1.1 to 0.4. The rate was stable at 0.8 in Denmark.
While the homicide rate inevitably varies in a small country year by year, Sweden appears to have transformed from one of the lower-crime countries in Western Europe to above average. We cannot say for certain how much immigration contributes to violent crime in Sweden. The numbers are collected by statistical agencies in Sweden, but they have not been reported since 2005 because of the informal taboo on linking immigration to crime.
While Fox paints too dark a picture of Sweden, other outlets are going to the other extreme in their eagerness to refute Donald Trump. The Washington Post credulously reports some highly questionable claims made in the Swedish newspaper DN.
The Washington Post cites criminologist Felipe Estrada Dörner: “Overall, Sweden’s average crime rate has fallen in recent years, Dörner said. That drop has been observed for cases of lethal violence and for sexual assaults.”
The associated graph shown by the Washington Post appears to confirm this picture for recent years, with data based on the self-reported NTU survey of crime victimization (the acronym comes from the Swedish name of the national survey).
This is either incompetence or manipulation. The text in the Washington Post discusses “sexual assault,” which spiked recently in Sweden in the NTU survey. The graph instead displays instances of “assault,” a non-sexual crime.
In quantitative terms, the NTU data on sexual assault show a rising victimization level from the first survey in 2005 to the last reported year, 2015. The legal definition of rape in Sweden, suddenly a hot topic in U.S. political discourse, is irrelevant here. These numbers are from a self-reported survey of sexual-crime victimization with the same definition over time. The number of sexual crimes reported to the police has also increased in recent decades, although here crime definitions and reporting rates become factors and make comparisons over time and with other countries difficult. There is no source pointing to a decrease in sexual crime over the long term in Sweden, and the increase in sexual assaults in official sources was grudgingly acknowledged by the Swedish media prior to Donald Trump’s comments.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the focus on overall crime statistics avoids the actual question being discussed: the situation in immigrant-dominated areas with low socioeconomic status. Around 95 percent of the Swedish population lives outside these areas. Hence, it takes a lot for crime trends in the “ghettoes” of Sweden to dominate overall trends. Four fifths of the population in Sweden are not immigrants. The overall crime trend and the effect of immigration on crime are therefore two different topics.
To isolate the effect of immigration on crime, we need data on crimes committed by immigrants. Obtaining this type of data is easy in the United States or Denmark, but not in Sweden. The last time there was an official report breaking down crime statistics by immigrant status and origin was in 2005, for the years 1997 to 2001. These statistics confirmed that immigrants were significantly overrepresented amongst offenders, in particular in committing violent crimes. The foreign born were four times more likely to be suspects in homicide cases than those with Swedish origin, and 4.5 times more likely to be suspects in rape cases.
Since then, Swedish criminologists and politicians have made sure that no new statistics have been released. Not a single recent research study in Sweden has attempted to estimate the causal effect of immigration on sexual assault or homicide rates. Parliament recently defeated a motion to produce up-to-date crime statistics based on national origin. We simply do not know what percentage of sexual assaults or homicides were committed by immigrants last year in Sweden. The Swedish criminologists and government officials who adamantly deny the effect of immigration on crime don’t know these figures, and strikingly don’t want to know. Americans who are interested in this topic should focus on this surreal taboo against statistics, not cartoonish exaggerations that falsely portray Sweden as a war zone.
The commitment to secrecy is a perfect example of how Western governments are fueling populism and distrust in established politicians. In order to get a less Trump-based and more fact-based debate, reasoned discussion based on current statistics would be a good start.
— Tino Sanandaji has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, and is currently a researcher at the Institute for Economic and Business History Research in Stockholm.
The good thing is that unless you live in a true totalitarian state media blackouts can’t hide the truth-the Fake News media was taught this lesson but they refuse to absorb it
Cherry pick the stats you need to prove your point
Swedish city of Malmö vs. Chicago
How about Malmö (3.4 per 100k) vs. Paris (1.8), London (1.3), Copenhagen (1.1) and Berlin (1.0)
Can we do info wars here?
http://www.infowars.com/culturally-enriched-malmo-sweden-is-the-most-dangerous-city-in-western-europe/
For later.
I hope the Swedes wise up and refuse all Muslim immigrants.
So you want us to believe, it’s ok if rape crimes are up as long as property damage and homicide numbers have decreased. Tell your wife, daughter, mother or grandmother that. They conveniently omitted no go zones also. Wow. I am not a fox fan, but the rapefugees have said with their own voices, they will rape you, because not doing so is being unfaithful to allllah. They rape the tiniest children for goodness sakes, because they can’t go to paradise as virgins unless they are muslims.
I agree fully with him that “Sweden’s crime-heavy immigrant neighborhoods emerged gradually through the accumulated effects of many decades of immigration” and is not (only) an effect of the latest wave of mainly immigration from the Middle East.
In the more moderate discussions this has now become the new accepted middle-of-the-road position.
However, what everyone seem to miss is the fact that if the Swedish immigration policies have been deficient for the last several decades, then the result of continuing with the same practices as we are letting in unprecedented numbers of people who are even more foreign to our culture than previous waves of immigrants, will inevitably lead to a catastrophe.
The only reasonable policy is to reduce the immigration to an absolute minimum - basically people with expertise that is needed for our society (which will preclude all and every young male from North Africa, Middle East and Pakistan and Afghanistan) - for such a time as the present problems have been resolved.
Just as in the USA, the ruling elites are riding roughshod over the citizenry. ”
According to statistics analyzed by the Sydsvenskan newspaper, Malmo has a “murder index” of 3.4 when homicides for one hundred thousand inhabitants are taken into account, a “a very high figure” according to the report.
This compares to bigger but less dangerous cities in western Europe like Paris (1.8), London (1.3), Copenhagen (1.1) and Berlin (1.0).
Having recorded 11 murders in 2016, Malmo is easily the most dangerous city in the entire Nordic region.
NATIONAL REVIEW SUCKS
The homicide numbers have not decreased. What is happening is that due to a change in our alcohol culture, not so much week-end alcoholim, the number of spousal homicides (mainly alcoholic male beating his spouse to death during an alcohol induced rage) has decreased. However, instead we are now seeing an increased number of gang related shootings, and knife attacks. Quite a few of those would have been deadly only a decade or so ago, but due to improved intensive care practices, the survival rate is better. So, we should have seen a reduction in homicides, just like Norway for instance, but due to the increased crime-rate in the immigrant rich areas the rate is roughly unchanged.
How many Swedish status statisticians are Kurdish?
Yet this one is Kurdish and I think that’s okay, that’s great:
what it points to is the new balkanized idea that the only individual qualified to criticize a given demographic is a person who himself is from that same demographic.
that’s ridiculous, debate limiting, and it is anti-democratic
P.S....when i used the word “you”, I didn’t mean you...i meant National Review.
RE: NATIONAL REVIEW SUCKS
What is it about this article you disagree with?
Only the dumbasses at NR would feel the need to bring us up to date on Swedish car theft stats.
RE: Only the dumbasses at NR would feel the need to bring us up to date on Swedish car theft stats.
The article was not simply written for readers of FR.
This sounds like a balanced assessment.
Free Republic has a great history of exposing the left wing liars in news for decades.
One of our best tools is do a Key Word search on a subject.
Below is the Sweden Key Word search on the violence reported in Sweden or not reported since President Trump brought up the discussion of Sweden and its muslim problem.
http://freerepublic.com/tag/sweden/index
Anyone, who reads/scans that search and doesn’t agree with President Trump is mentally ill and probably on George $oreA$$’s paid Trolls against Trump roster.
How many native Swedes want to live in the Muslim immigrant ghettos of Malmö - or anywhere else they live in any concentrations? How soon before the massive inflows of Muslims and Sharia Law change Sweden permanently like every other country with large percentages of Muslims? When does the real subjugation and bloodletting of Swedish Infidels start?
Answer these questions and forget about how many homicides happened last year because the numbers are only going to increase.
A too-large number of unassimilated immigrants influences the immigrant populations that are already there, thus creating a critical mass that will not assimilate easily. It the unassimilated reach a tipping point, situations such as increased crime will occur.
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