Poor immigration policies, an inadequate legal toolkit, and resistance from bureaucrats have made this drastic step necessary.
Poor immigration policies, an inadequate legal toolkit, and resistance from bureaucrats have made this drastic step necessary.
P rime Minister Ulf Kristersson recently announced that Sweden will allow its military to aid the police in the fight against organized crime. This announcement has come as a surprise to many. Kristersson and his fragile governing coalition were elected last year on a promise of crushing the gangs and cracking down on crime, but the crime wave has shown no signs of slowing down. While the next Swedish parliamentary election is not for another three years, polling numbers reflect this reality, and the government is struggling to regain control of the narrative.
In discussing Sweden’s immigration failures, I have pointed to immigration’s role in rising crime. Over 60 percent of gang members in Sweden are first- or second-generation immigrants. There are now an estimated 30,000 gang members in Sweden, which on a per capita basis means Sweden now has more organized crime than the United States. While gun violence is still less prevalent here than in the U.S., the trend is quite dire: The number of deadly shootings has tripled in less than ten years. Meanwhile, possession with the intent to sell has quadrupled in just 20 years. Both types of crimes are predominantly committed by criminal gangs.
Not only are there more gang members than in the past, but the number of innocent people falling victim to gang violence is increasing. Whereas in the past what few gangs Sweden had tended to fight with other gangs, now the gangs are bolder, frequently fighting openly in streets, schoolyards, and playgrounds and extorting businesses for protection money. With guns being easier to come by, more innocent people are also getting caught up in the crossfire.
In addition to gun violence, bombings are on the rise. In fact, Sweden now has the second-highest number of bombings per capita of any non-warring nation in the world (surpassed only by Mexico). It is said that when Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, his greatest fear was that it would be used as a weapon. More than a century after his death, his nightmare has now come true in his native Sweden.
How Did We Get Here?
The inadequate management of the volume of immigration has led to rampant segregation, one of the leading causes of crime. Large groups in Swedish society feel no loyalty toward the state and do not accept the basic idea that living in a country means being subject to that country’s laws, even if they conflict with cultural or tribal norms and traditions. The divergence in values between these groups and the Swedish majority was further evidenced by the disturbing open street parties in Malmö and other Swedish cities celebrating the recent Hamas attacks in Israel.
Still, there are many other contributing factors, one of them being free movement between the member states of the European Union. As the union has expanded eastward, free movement has in practice meant the free movement of drugs and guns — a bonanza for organized crime. After centuries of strict gun control, there are now plenty of guns in Sweden; but because of that gun control, only criminals have them. Even cops do not usually carry guns.
The Swedish legal system is not fit to fight armed criminal gangs. Whereas in the U.S., RICO laws were wielded to shut down entire criminal organizations and seize their assets, Sweden lacks this vital tool.
Swedish law also has no plea deals. While it can certainly be argued that plea deals are abused in the U.S., their role in fighting organized crime cannot be denied: By offering a few low-level gang members immunity in exchange for testifying against their superiors, prosecutors are able to bring down an entire mob. In Sweden, there is no benefit to pleading guilty or “snitching,” so few gang members do. Sweden views plea deals as morally repugnant because they allow certain criminals to walk, depriving their victims of redress. This argument, however, is undermined by the fact that sentences even for those convicted are so lenient as to make a mockery of the victims’ pain.
This brings me to my next point: Lenient sentences encourage crime. In addition to targeting non-gang members, another way that crime has changed is the recruitment of children into the gangs. Children as young as eight years old are used as drug couriers, and kids in their early teens are taught how to shoot and plant explosives. Under Swedish law, no person under the age of 15 can be prosecuted. A juvenile delinquent may at most be sent to “closed juvenile care,” which is not the same thing as a juvenile prison. Most young criminals will only ever receive a visit and/or a sternly worded letter from the Child Protective Services addressed to their parents. This was true even for those who joined ISIS.
Criminals aged 15 to 18 can be prosecuted but are entitled to an automatic “youth discount” when sentenced, ensuring that few ever see the inside of a prison. A gang-related mass shooting in a shopping mall in Malmö last year saw the 15-year- old perpetrator receive a sentence of four years of closed juvenile care. This “humane” approach does not have a great track record, with nine out of ten young gang member reoffending after release.
Furthermore, all criminals are entitled to a “bulk discount”: Someone who is convicted for multiple crimes will receive a full sentence only on the severest crime. Last year a serial rapist was caught and convicted on 19 counts of sex crimes, ranging from rape to harassment. Under the penal code, he should have been sentenced to 16 years in prison, itself a ridiculously short sentence. As a result of the bulk discount, this predator received a mere five years.
When the youth and bulk discounts are combined, the sentences become even more absurd, as when a 17-year-old convicted on six counts of child rape — and no, not statutory rape — was sentenced to a mere three months.
With good behavior, these two will both be out after serving just two-thirds of their sentences. Even if they were to be unfortunate enough to have to serve out their entire sentences, Swedish prisons are quite a bit more comfortable than their American counterparts.
For Swedish progressives, the maddening thing is that, as they see it, Sweden has done everything right. The unwillingness to crack down on lawlessness is largely based on past governments’ reliance on progressive theories on crime. As long as the theory said we were doing things right, the actual outcome didn’t matter.
Gun control? Check. Disarming police? Check. Lenient sentences? Check. Comfortable prisons focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment? Check. Juvenile criminals being referred to social services rather than imprisoned? Check. Free pre-K? Check. Free school lunches? Check. Free college tuition? Check. Universal health care? Check. High minimum wages? Check. Government benefits that help migrants settle into society so they don’t have to turn to crime? Check.
For everyone other than the progressives, however, it may seem strange that Sweden is only now utilizing its military to take on the gangs, as every other institution has clearly failed.
The crime wave overtaking Sweden in recent years presents a disparity between the predicted and actual outcomes of progressive policies, leaving them grasping at straws, claiming that violent crime hasn’t increased but that people are simply more prone to report crime nowadays. No empirical evidence exists to support this idea, but progressives keep parroting it. To a certain mindset, it appears that, until about 20 years ago, if someone got shot in the streets, the victim’s loved ones would just quietly bury them and carry on with their lives without notifying police. That’s not quite how I remember my childhood, but then again I was a sheltered kid.
Immediately following Kristersson’s speech, “Ådalen” began to trend on Swedish X/Twitter. That name carries gruesome memories: In 1931, a striking labor union organized a march at Ådalen. The government, fearing a violent clash between the strikers and the strikebreakers, made the fatal decision to deploy soldiers to keep the peace. Nobody knows who shot first, but at the end of the day, five strikers lay dead, killed by their own country’s military.
The events in Ådalen became a propaganda victory for the Swedish labor movement. The Social Democrats, who won the following year’s election in a landslide, held power for the next 44 years. Laws were subsequently passed to prevent the military from ever intervening in civilian affairs, even in the event of riots.
Of course, there is really no comparison between using the military against strikers and using it against criminal gangs. Those invoking the memory of Ådalen are doing so dishonestly to further their own political aims.
Will It Work?
The question is whether military force will work. The kind of intervention described in Kristersson’s speech is a far cry from the “snipers on the street” approach used in recent decades in countries such as Mexico and El Salvador. But soldiers acting in supporting roles under the authority of the badly understaffed police force could make a difference — provided that the government is willing to carry out the legal and administrative overhaul that Sweden so desperately needs.
At the risk of invoking the Trumpist “drain the swamp” rhetoric, it is a fact that Sweden’s administrative state has a serious left-wing bias. For decades it has been an open secret that to make a career in the Swedish civil service one must be a card-carrying member of the Social Democrats (or one of their coalition partners). As a result, right-wing governments always face massive internal resistance from government workers in virtually all areas of policy, but particularly migration and crime.
Kristersson is a smart man and a capable administrator, but so far he has not shown the courage to clean house, fearing the backlash that would inevitably result from firing people for merely having the wrong political beliefs — which ignores that these people were only hired for having the “right” political beliefs in the first place. Out of the four right-wing parties that make up the governing coalition, only the Sweden Democrats (of which I am a member) are actively pushing to replace the left-wing bureaucrats that make the job of implementing the policies the Swedish people voted for in last year’s election so much more difficult than it has to be.
Without new leadership of the Swedish Police Authority and Prosecution Authority, it likely won’t matter how many more cops are recruited, or how many soldiers are sent to assist them. While the government was elected on a tough-on-crime agenda, most of the crime-fighting reforms are still in the pipeline, where they will stay as long as the government insists on following the standard procedure of having all proposals evaluated by government agencies and stakeholders prior to implementation. These agencies are for the most part led by people who believe anything more severe than a slap on the wrist is a human-rights violation.
Instead, the government ought to announce a major criminal-reform package consisting of minimum sentences for all violent and organized crime, RICO laws, immunity for gang informants, increased surveillance including stop-and-frisk, mandatory deportation of noncitizens who commit felonies, and a lowering of the age of legal responsibility.
The government should set deadlines by which it expects these reforms to be implemented. Government staff who do not feel up to the task are free to hand in their resignations. If the government believes the situation to be serious enough to justify military deployment, which I would agree with, it must also be serious enough to speed up the legislative process. Kristersson is desperate to show that he is tough enough to take on the gangs, but first, he must show that he is tough enough to take on the status quo within the administrative state.