I don't know the article you're talking about and I haven't looked up violent crime statistics for Sweden - but a couple of anecdotes from you and your friends does not necessarily mean that violent crime across the country is increasing, right?
Have you had the experience of reading in the newspaper about topics which you personally know?
The increase in this column is extreme compared to 1950, but that is probably because of a broadening of what is classified as an offense rather than the population becoming ~7.5 times more likely to commit crime.
If you look at a more recent stretch of time, e.g. 1990 to 2019, you can plot the numbers of total offenses and add a trend line if it isn't obvious by looking at the column. We can also just look at what we might call "murder" in the US, or column I which shows "Completed murder, manslaughter, and assault resulting in death". The figure here shows that 2019 has a rate of 4 murders per 100k population which is an upward trend, you can look back at this column to confirm this for yourself.
Sweden also publishes an annual crime survey where a nationally representative sample of Swedes are asked if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year [2]. This is actually not quite the same thing as the number of crimes because respondents just answer yes or no, so a respondent who has been repeatedly victimized will simply say yes, but their multiple victimizations will not be represented. This is a bit worse than you might think if crime tends to be localized to certain areas, which would make the people living in those areas more likely to be affected multiple times (and that probably is true in my opinion but I don't have a handy source for that).
What the victimization survey shows is an upward bend in the lines that describe percentages of the population that have been the victim of different types of crime starting in 2015. I think it's worth pointing out that the graph is an objective scale, so a change from 2% to 2.5% may look small, but another way to think about it would be an increase of 25% of a certain type of crime. The text of this page[2] describes more detail about the survey results, but here is a quote that I think is representative -
"Almost half (47%) of the population (aged 16–84) have great concern about crime in society, which is a significant increase compared to 2019 (43%) and the highest level measured since 2007."
I think this is representative for two reasons. First, it shows that people in Sweden are concerned about crime and becoming moreso, which would fit given what we've seen in the survey and offense record data. Second, it shows that this is not some never-before seen problem in Sweden. Crime is increasing (as is concern about crime) but it is increasing on the scales of things that have happened before, as opposed to how an alarmist might describe it.
Sweden also has an epidemic of "bombings". As near as I can tell it is the number one country for "bombings" in the world. Wikipedia has a good summary[3] and illustrative graph in the upper right hand corner. You can see in the graph that the problem explodes, as it were, in 2015 and later. Similar trend to what we saw in the crime data.
Here is a quote from the wikipedia page -
"According to police in Gothenburg and Malmö in 2016, the use of hand grenades by criminals in Sweden is a phenomenon which is unusual for all comparable countries both inside and outside the EU. According to criminologists Manne Gerell and Amir Rostami, the only other country that keeps track of hand grenade explosions is Mexico. While Mexico has a murder rate 20 times that of Sweden, on the specific category of grenade explosions per capita the two countries were comparable at the time"
Earlier, I put "bombing" in scare quotes. This is because the word bombing to my mind conjures something like the Oklahoma City Bombing but in Sweden it is usually hand grenades, which do explode, but not nearly as much. Relatively few people are killed in Sweden's bombings - this news article explains a bit more [4] and there is an interesting report from the National Council for Crime Prevention [5] which is actually about shootings among Sweden's criminal element where investigators interview violent Swedish criminals and try to figure out why they committed these crimes. Though the focus is shootings, I expect bombings have similar motiviations (and the news article I linked shares the same sentiments).
Basically, the bombings happen to intimidate rival gangs, scare away customers from enemy drug dealers, intimidate store owners into paying "protection" money, things like that. The police are fairly frequent targets of grenade attacks in Sweden too. I have a graph illustrating this somewhere, but for now, just look at Wikipedia's (incomplete) list of grenade attacks in Sweden [6] and ctrl-f for the word "police" and scroll through the page. You'll get an idea for the proportion of attacks which target the police (either police vehicles or buildings).
There are also what I'll call "sensational" changes to crime. I don't mean that the changes are super huge or something, but rather I mean that some kinds of crime may have disproportionate impact on public perception because of their nature. I believe, though I can't easily demonstrate this as we can with the statistics above, that there are certain types of crime or behavior which are different from earlier behaviors. Bombings may fall into this category too.
This category can be relatively mild, e.g. here[7] is a news story about a small town where a woman is complaining that she is now constantly harassed and afraid to work alone at her bakery because of men harassing her and making her feel unsafe. Other examples are things like mass car burnings, the NYT reported on an incident in 2018[8] where 100 cars were burned in one attack.
Other examples of this type of thing are like this incident where two men were attacked, tortured, raped, and buried alive[9]. There are other examples of things like this were victims are beaten up, mutiliated, urinated on, taped, etc. But I hardly think a list of news articles detailing bad things that happened in Sweden would be very productive. The point is, there are sensational crimes in the media too. Maybe things like these are always happening, and maybe Swedish men always harassed small town bakers and waitresses to the point where they feel unsafe in their shops, but that's my intuition or impression from reading about it.
Finally, I'll wrap up with a mention of gang rape, which I feel is also part of the sensational category in that it is such a dramatic and horrible crime that it causes an outsize impact on the public consciousness. The Swedish news organization Expressen investigated gang rapes where the gang rapists were convicted between 2016 and 2017. In an article [10] on their investigation they write:
"The convicted perpetrators in the investigation are to a very large extent of foreign origin.
32 of them were born abroad. A total of 40 of the 43 convicted perpetrators are either foreign-born or born in Sweden with two immigrant parents."
1 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...
2 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden
4 - https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-wit...
5 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/...
6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
7 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-...
8 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-f...
9 - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-ra...
10 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-ma...
[1] https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...
I'd like to see those links, thanks.
"Crime has not significantly increased country-wide" and "two severe criminal incidents happened to me or my close friends recently" are in fact not mutually exclusive statements.