Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

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You use a very vague language to tie violence in Sweden to immigrants.

Then you link a study without really going much about how the study supports your claims, as if that is evidence of what you suggest.

You are gesturing to one thing - "there's a study on gang violence in Sweden" - and presenting it as evidence of another thing - "immigrants are to blame for gang violence".

So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing; I suppose you did not (or if you did you are hypocritically linking it hoping no one else does:

> One of the most consistent findings in research on societal responses to a collective threat is the tendency for the majority population to seek culpability, often by attributing blame to an outgroup perceived to be associated with the perpetrators (Frey, 2022; Ramirez and Kim, 2024). This process, known as scapegoating, is a psychological coping mechanism in which individuals displace frustration or anxiety onto an entire group (Frey, 2022).

And this, buddy, is precisely what you are doing.

> So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing

Huh, so did I... but clearly one of us didn't read it thoroughly enough.

The first sentence of the abstract says the surge in shootings is "disproportionately involving young men with immigrant backgrounds".

Page 2: people with an immigrant background are 80% of shooting victims and 64% of perpetrators (citing Brå).

You seem to just skip to the theory section page 13 regarding scapegoating.

To be fair, the original claim was overcooked in two places. "All linked" should be "most", and "more than any other country" needs a qualifier:

1) Brå compared Sweden with 22 other European countries. Sweden is the only one with a continuous rise in gun homicide since 2005

https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-05-26-gun-h...

2) the OECD's own conclusion was that 2014–15 Sweden saw the largest per-capita inflow of asylum seekers ever recorded in an OECD country

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/international-migration...

3) Brå's register study puts the relative risk of being a crime suspect at 2.5x for the foreign-born and 3.2x for the second generation, with excess risk remaining after controlling for age, sex, income and education

https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-08-25-regis...

https://bra.se/download/18.45e4b8e192705389a34c2b/1729515966...

The most dangerous, then, are "Swedish" persons with a migrant background, born and raised in Sweden- I'm not sure how to answer that, but that's really uncomfortable.

4) None of this is a fringe reading. Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrat, then PM) said in 2022 that integration had failed and produced parallel societies feeding the gangs... Kristersen as PM (right wing) said the same thing a year later.. so it has some broad bipartisan agreement.

https://www.euronews.com/2022/04/29/us-sweden-immigration

https://www.government.se/speeches/2023/09/prime-minister-ul...

For non-Swedes, all the links with the domain "bra.se" is the government department for prevention of crime, and as part of that role has been given the objective from the government to collect crime statistic. They provide data, conclusions and advice the government on how to effectively combat crime. They also have direct access to police and court databases in order to achieve their objectives.

They are the official source for crime statistics in Sweden.

Should be noted that for years(decades?) they didn't do any statistics regarding the heritage of criminals because of the taboo, while a massive influx of migrants was coming.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/svt-s-rundringning-visar-...

I find it fascinating that people in this thread are arguing against raw government crime statistics and are asking for further evidence of this problem.

Where? I didn't see anyone contest official crime statistics?

I did read the study.

The problem is that those statistics are doing something sensible. There are uncomfortable statistics related to immigrants, and your point #4, the thing about integration not being properly done creating parallel societies is a real problem that can and should be addressed properly.

But that's not what the person I replied to was doing - "all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs"

No, the study says that a foreign-born person is "2.5x" more likely to be a "crime suspect". That can mean a lot of things (e.g.: how many of them were actually convicted). Also, they are minority. Presuming all of them are convicted, it's still a minority that has about double the odds of being criminals. The logical consequence is that a lot of Swedish people are criminals if there's an explosion of gang violence.

Maybe the problem is the Swedish approach to guns? I live in a country that has a shitton of immigrants and is not seeing this surge of gun violence.

You see, we can discuss this properly without engaging in ethnonationalist bullshit.

We can, but there is always a large amount of people who struggle to articulate their emotions and would prefer to label and condemn- true of basically every “side” on any topic from what I can tell.

This has been especially true in Sweden, and I’ve seen it, the way people talk about migration is: if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

This seems to have taken the sting out of supporting actual Nazi parties (SD)…

So while you and I can debate the facts, the larger trend in society is not due to us as individuals, its how much society permits this dialogue to happen at all before trying to shut it down with bad faith and unreasoned statements.

That's the curse of democracy, and I don't say this as a way to tarnish it. I prefer living in a democracy anyway.

We can't expect everyone to be informed and educated. I perceive most people as being guided by basic emotions - Mostly their fears.

> if you talk about it, you are a nazi.

Part of the problem I perceive on the left was unwillingness, for a long time, to engage with it at all. For a long time in the past decade, and in many ways to this day, the whole immigration discussion was dominated by people that were just annoyed that there's too many brown people walking around nowadays.

And that's how you poison the well of discussion. If you accept immigrants, you should expect people to behave in a certain way. In many ways a visa is a privilege, not a right. But how can you even start this conversation when a mouth breather will come out of his hole branding about claims about all crimes being tied to immigrants?

Honestly, this sort of sucks.

The claim made was that all crime is linked to refugees.

We can agree that the 'all' part was just the original commenters own biases, but that 'refugee' part is still unfounded based on your quotes.

Refugees are a small minority of immigrants (historically around 10%, don't know what it is in Sweden). The quotes you cite are about immigrants, and the few nationalities mentioned are Turkey and Serbia: neither is a country where refugees originate (except maybe LGBT people, but I'd be very surprised if Sweden is in the thrall of gay Turks...).

So the assertion about immigrant backgrounds seems to hold, but nothing says it's related to refugees, otherwise the large majority of these criminals would be Afghan, Syrian, Eritrean, etc., which doesn't seem to be the case.

First, I’m not your buddy, and that kind of condescending language doesn’t really help the discussion. Second, I assumed these issues were common knowledge since the frequent shootings in broad daylight that have rocked Sweden in the last couple of years have been from immigrant gang violence, and I mistakenly assumed everyone was aware of these news reports. But perhaps it’s only most obvious here in Europe.

There are other comments in this thread that are expressing the situation better than I am.

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