amnesty for guns, allowing criminals to hand
them over to police without penalty in order
to get some of the weapons off the streets.
The government has also announced a plan
for a hand grenade amnesty, but it’s unclear
why radicalised gang members would return
explosives. The Prime Minister, Stefan
Löfven, even raised the prospect of send-
ing in the army — which caused such a reac-
tion that he quickly rowed back. He never
did clarify exactly what the military could do
that our police cannot.
The Prime Minister’s wavering shows
what happens when you fail to integrate
immigrants and instead tolerate the crea-
tion of a society within a society: the police
are unable to protect or to gather proper
knowledge of these new communities full of
people who tend not to speak the language.
Representatives of the Swedish state — par-
amedics, social workers and even librarians
— are met with aggression.
This has led the Swedish police into an
identity crisis of its own. Its officers have
been the targets of a number of attacks,
most recently explosions aimed at police in
southern Sweden. Dan Eliasson, departing
head of the national police, complains that
investigations are made difficult because no
one will talk to the police. The kind of social
contract between state and society that leads
citizens to help the authorities is not work-
ing in those parts of Sweden where police
are seen as the enemy.
The police’s language is often sympathet-
ic rather than condemnatory. Linda Staaf,
a police chief, has pointed out that grenade-
throwing is dangerous because those who
pull out the pin ‘expose themselves to a
huge risk’. Jan Evensson, Stockholm’s police
chief, also makes his case on compassionate
grounds: ‘It’s hard to be a criminal. We want
to help them get out of it.’ This famously
soft approach once worked well in Sweden,
but society has changed and the authorities
have not kept up. For the political establish-ment it seemed for a long time as if all this
trouble might not affect everyday life for the
Swedish middle class.
That, too, may be changing. In the past
weeks, children in the well-off Stockholm
suburb of Nacka have been victims of rob-
beries by masked gangs who are suspected
of travelling from other parts of the city.
Children as young as nine have been robbed
at knifepoint. The outrage that followed the
robberies in Nacka also serves as a reminder
of how deeply divided Swedish society hasbecome among lines of class and ethnicity.
In an immigrant neighbourhood in Goth-
enburg, nursery and pre-school children
took to the streets with their teachers as long
ago as 2014 to protest against gang violence
after almost a dozen shootings in the area
in a few months, including one in the pre-
school yard. They even wrote a letter to the
gangsters: ‘Our children don’t come to pre-
school because their parents are afraid. And
they are afraid of you. And when children do
come to pre-school, their parents beg us to
keep the children inside.’
Nevertheless, two years later, a hand gre-
nade went off in the apartment next door,
killing British boy Yuusuf Warsame. After
his murder, a teacher said: ‘It’s terrible to say,
but we’re beginning to get used to it.’ In such
neighbourhoods, this is the tragic reality:
people are growing acclimatised to violence,
in the way that the Swedish middle classes
have not (so far) had to. They can afford to
be philosophical about immigration and the
new criminal trends, to ignore the problem
and hope that it goes away. It’s safe to say, by
now, that this has not worked. Whether Swe-
den’s political class can come up with a more
effective solution is another question.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Paulina Neuding and Fraser Nelson on
crime in Sweden.The police are often sympathetic to
offenders. ‘It’s hard to be a criminal.
We want to h elp th em,’ said on e chiefBe coldhearted.
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