Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  “Gun crime in Sweden, was, by 2015, ten times higher than the UK so it’s diverging trends there. You can’t not notice it steadily going up year after year,” Gerell told me.

  The hand-grenades, being such an alien idea to me, were another area to pursue. I’ve been to a few jobs where people have found old ones in gardens and lofts, but never where the pin has been pulled on active weapons with intent. There was of course the murder of police officers Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone, though it remains exceptional in terms of British history. The devices also appeared to be coming from the Balkans, but most of the cases the police had investigated weren’t clear according to Gerell. “Most of the explosions are related to sending a message to someone, scaring. They haven’t been thrown at living people but empty stores or restaurants and cars with no one in. They tend to explode either in the disadvantaged areas or around nightclubs in the city centres, where it could be suspected there is some link to gang criminals acting in revenge, or competing criminal groups in conflict over areas,” he said. Having spent a lot of time studying the Mafia and Russian criminal gangs, I can’t help but think of this as standard extortion and intimidation. Criminal turf war acts.

  “I shouldn’t say too much,” Gerell added, “but a lot of people think it’s criminal gangs from the disadvantaged areas or the motorcycle gangs. But many of these cases aren’t solved.” While we could have speculated on the basis of broader information, the simple answer was neither of us could safely attribute the explosions to anyone with any degree of accuracy. It was not only Balkan grenades being used, however. Home-made explosives of varying complexities often appeared to be used in offences, again targeting empty premises and vehicles but, in rarer cases, people had also been killed and injured. “Up until three or four years ago we had a few cases a year but not a lot. In the last couple of years, there’s been twenty or thirty in a year, which is something different and very media friendly,” he said.

  The theme kept coming up, this idea the media only grab hold of what is a little controversial, and it took me back to a discussion I once had with a reporter from the Daily Mail. “We only print what’s likely to cause rage or fear,” they’d told me. “That’s where the circulation figures come from.”

  I carried on with my questions, asking directly what the precise link was between immigration and crime in Sweden. The answer surprised me again.

  “Honestly, we don’t know,” Gerell said, without hesitation. “It’s not that easy to disentangle the effect of immigration on crime and nobody’s even tried to do it, not even on the macro scale. That’s on immigration and crime. The related but different issue of immigrants and crime – how many more crimes does an immigrant commit rather than a native born – we have plenty of data on that.” This was the most candid conversation anyone was, or is, likely to have on such a sensitive topic and I was absolutely intrigued as he continued. “Immigrants do tend to commit more crime so, in all likelihood, immigration has increased crime in Sweden,” he told me. “But that would be not by a tonne. It would be a fairly small number. A few percent or something, but we don’t have an actual number.”

  There was a definite headline here which could be easily adapted to political agenda or meet the Daily Mail criteria for newspaper sales, but that is not how I operate and there was an obvious complexity which needed exploring in detail.

  “There’s a hypothesis which has been raised by a criminology professor in Sweden, who’s actually in the field of immigration and crime, and he suggests immigrants have become the new underclass,” Gerell said. “So, while they commit a lot more crimes, they are replacing native-borns that otherwise would be down a class and committing more crimes. He’s arguing that immigration hasn’t increased crime, just led to other people committing the crimes.”

  The theory of a new underclass has been around for a long time, since 1963 in fact, when it was coined by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal53. He described a worldwide portion of the population cut off from society – lacking the education and skills necessary to function successfully in the modern era – and this echoed with Nils Karlsson’s comments on the link between education and the new job market which replaced industry in Malmö. Gerell takes the theory into account but holds his own view.

  “To me, that hypothesis is not entirely implausible,” he said. “It seems likely that, seeing as immigrants do commit more crime than native-borns, immigration should lead to some more crimes but, of course, we’re mixing levels of analysis here. Individuals and countries. But, in my opinion, I wouldn’t be surprised if immigration has increased crime but not doubling or anything. Five percent or something, and it’s different for different crime types.”

  I put Karlsson’s comments on the table and we discussed the issue of the link between vulnerability, geography, and criminality in the context of immigration and the housing options for immigrants. We also touched on the socio-economic factors of unemployment, non-skilled workers in a competitive job market, and the affordable housing in Malmö’s eastern districts. I wanted to know if these factors were reflected in the crime figures to support either the underclass – or, indeed, Gerell’s own – hypothesis.

  “It kind of depends on how you count,” he said. “The highest crime areas in Malmö or anywhere in Sweden is this type of place.” He nodded around us at the busy central station again. “Central station, the main square, the nightlife district, that is where most crimes are committed. And that’s true for most types of crime: theft, robbery, pickpocketing, assaults. But if you take these places aside and look at residential areas there’s a lot more crime in the vulnerable neighbourhoods.”

  But it isn’t all types of crime which are higher in the financially challenged districts.

  “It’s the kind of crimes which are discussed a lot,” Gerell said. “So you have burning cars, arsons, shootings, explosives, hand grenades, open-air drug markets. Those types of crime are very much associated with these vulnerable neighbourhoods where people are a lot poorer, most of them are immigrants. There are a lot more problems.”

  The socio-economic impact on the environment, Gerell agreed, was inseparable from any discussions about criminality. “It’s really difficult to disentangle all that, unemployment, social assistance and welfare, crowding and multi-occupancy. All of these issues crowd together in the same neighbourhoods and it’s not surprising we see lots of social problems arise there, including crimes,” he told me.

  Once again, the wider portrayal of events, both in the traditional and alternative media became a huge influence on the perceived impact of crime.

  “You see the burning cars in the media, it gets a lot of attention. Also shootings. You hear it, hear the guns. It’s different from most crimes, which you don’t see. Unless you’re the one burglarized, you’re not going to notice, not see it, not going to know it happened. But you can hear gunshots, see a burning car, see the burned out wreck,” Gerell said. “It adds to the whole discussion that the types of crime which have the strongest level in these neighbourhoods are much more visible. Much more media friendly. Which drives the whole debate and discussion.”

  In recent years there had been a reduction in crime on the whole in Sweden, with property offences trending downwards, car theft and bike theft being the high volume. But these decreases are being “eaten up,” as Gerell said, by increases in fraud, a trend now a common across the western world.

  “There’s a similar thing in assaults,” Gerell added. “Where they had been decreasing there’s now an increase in people reporting less serious offences where there’s no mark, nothing visible or anything. And also with bystanders reporting crimes, when it only used to be the victims reporting. When a crime is reported it’s still counted in the statistics, even if it’s proven nothing happened.” This was interesting, something I had noticed elsewhere, and Gerell followed up with the information I wanted without even being asked.

  “Despite this, the crime survey, the victimisation survey, shows crime goi
ng down and this is also shown in the hospital visits due to violence by another person. It was actually a record low last year for hospital visits from violence since they started summarising the statistics ten years ago. So I think we can say violence is actually going down in Sweden.” This underlined the balance needed between the accurate recording of crime by the police and the requirement to verify trends against data beyond one recording authority. Interestingly, Gerell continued by describing the social demographic of assaults – again, an indicator of reducing violent crime. “In the highest group open to violent victimisation, men aged 15-24, the hospital rate is down to half of what it was in 2007. That’s quite a dramatic improvement and hospital visits are a good external measurement of serious violence.”

  In Mexico, I’d set the murder rates against public health data to expose the scale of manipulation in respect of the homicide rates, so Gerell was on the money. There was, however, something we hadn’t touched on yet – the status of immigrants as victims of crime rather than offenders – and I wanted to find out what statistics there were on this.

  “We have the crime survey,” Gerell explained, “and it shows immigrants are a bit more likely to be victimised, but the over-representation isn’t as high as in the offending.” Having heard the term over-representation with Karlsson too, I was desperate to get to the bottom of its true meaning.

  “It has many connotations and is used in many ways,” Gerell said. “But, basically, the word was chosen by the National Council of Crime Prevention because they wanted to emphasise that most crimes are committed by native Swedes.” It appears, however, that the exercise exposed something entirely different, and gave rise to the expression which was the source of my intrigue. “Not that they commit more crimes, but relative to their share of population, immigrants commit more crime than would be expected. Crude estimates, native born compared to immigrants, show a difference that is quite big,” Gerell added.

  This was interesting and Gerell got straight to the obvious point before I could ask.

  “There are many more males who are immigrants and, also, because more young people are immigrants compared to native-borns, so when you start adjusting for factors like that the representation goes down. Some studies have taken socioeconomic differences into account on top of this more thoroughly, looking at a family situation and the neighbourhood where you grow up. Then you can actually explain away most of the over-representation.”

  Even taking these factors in and weighing them up, Gerell says there is an over-representation of immigrants in the crime statistics of between 20-70% depending on which crimes you look at. This ended up pointing to the existence of structural discrimination clearly for the first time. “Over-representation is bigger if you look at convictions compared to arrests,” he told me. “We’re not sure why but maybe, in part, it could be because of some implicit bias.” This gets straight to the heart of the issue I had mulled earlier. One which faces most societies now. “They’ll be more likely to be charged or spotted to begin with, then convicted. They then have fewer resources to draw on for the defence. There are tonnes of potential biases which could explain how this increases,” Gerell explained, then pointed me towards a study in the British Journal of Criminology from 2013, which explored the links to immigration, socio-economic status, and over-representation.

  After chatting for longer, both enjoying ourselves, we turned the conversation towards Donald Trump and his “last night in Sweden” comment – which Gerell knew was the reason I had ended up coming to Malmö in the first place.

  “I think Carl Bildt, the previous Prime Minister of Sweden, was right when he said ‘what has he been smoking?’ on Twitter,” Gerell said with a smile. “Eventually he [Trump] kind of cleared it up that he meant the whole piece on Fox news about immigration and crime and there is some fire behind the smoke. It’s not entirely wrong but, because it’s been distorted, it is entirely wrong.” I understood the contradiction Gerell was raising, which also went back to Karlsson’s epistemology approach.

  In respect of whether what Trump said was justified as a throw away comment about terror attacks, Gerell was clear. “No, I don’t think it was justified. There are problems but it’s not like society is going down or something.”

  What I really wanted to know after all this was whether or not people feel safe in Sweden, and Gerell was the national expert.

  “There was a reduction last year in perceived safety. Fear of crime increased in the survey quite a bit but that’s just one year of measurement and it still tells us that seventy-five percent of the population feel safe and are not scared. So it’s too early to say that we are doomed,” he told me.

  The world climate had shifted significantly in the months leading to my trip, with an increase in hard political leanings more commonly being expressed in the media, and I asked Gerell for his view.

  “It’s complicated and difficult to disentangle all these things but media and media reporting can have an impact on perceptions of safety and fear of crime,” he reiterated. “The whole public discourse and media climate changed dramatically a year and a half ago with a big influx of refugees coming. Literally, in one week our prime minister was at a refugee demonstration saying ‘in my Europe we don’t build any walls’ and a couple of months later they put up border controls to stop the refugees coming here.”

  Gerell described the change in approach as “huge”, an almost complete U-turn. “That was the Social Democrats in government with the Greens, who are traditionally pro-immigrant, but they are now supporting these measures where Sweden completely turned its policy around. That influences everything, the discussion, how people see the issues of crime and immigration,” he said, which left me wondering how does such a significant change happen. “What happened was, everyone saw our nice policy and when they came here we couldn’t handle it so they had to clamp down and now we are at the minimum level of the European Union, having really strict rules on everything.”

  I had been reading the Sapö intelligence service reports on the huge reductions in people being tracked travelling from Sweden to war zones such as Syria and wanted to cross check my understanding these numbers had also reduced significantly.

  “It’s not really my area of expertise, but there’s lots of discussion on it,” Gerell replied. “Similar trends, maybe not as strong and dramatic, but similar trends have been seen elsewhere in Europe. Likely it has things to do with tighter border controls with Turkey and our local controls. Mainly, probably, it’s to do with the war in Syria and how the Islamic State is faring in the conflict. It’s not going so well anymore, so it’s not as attractive to go down there.” This was far from difficult to agree with.

  Sombrely, before it came time for me to move on, I asked Gerell for his view on the horrifying Stockholm attack which had occurred only days before I travelled to Sweden.

  “It’s unusual. We’ve only had one failed Islamic terror attack before so obviously...he only killed himself. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s extremely surprising in a way. Most people were expecting it to happen eventually. We don’t consider ourselves invulnerable so when this stuff happens elsewhere it’s not unlikely to come to Sweden as well,” he concluded pragmatically.

  Wandering out of the station I felt conflicted. There was much hypothesis around crime and immigration but no concrete data and some of the information which did exist was contradictory. All I could say with any degree of certainty was areas with less money and status were more likely to be the places where media friendly, visual crimes happened. That was no different to London, or Derby, or anywhere else.

  The only thing to do, I decided, was to get out on the ground and take a look around for myself.

  Six:

  Malmö is a port city, the capital of Sweden's Skåne County, and the third largest population centre in the country54. The wharf faces the Øresund (which, apparently, is written Öresund in Swedish), where a joint venture between Denmark and Sweden built the trem
endous bridge which spans the waters separating them. In many ways, Malmö has the look and feel of Liverpool or Hull, with a population of around three hundred and fifty thousand meaning it sits somewhere in between both.

  As Nils Karlsson pointed out to me during our meeting at the Stadhuset, Malmö has undergone a huge transformation in its economy, shifting from traditional industry to biotech, IT, and the creative sectors. A key driver in this change of once declining fortunes appears to have been a combination of the Øresund Bridge itself and the foundation of the University of Malmö in 1998.

  The bridge, which is estimated to generate around six and a half billion Kronor a year in terms of economic benefit, runs nearly eight kilometres from the Swedish coast to an artificial island, Peberholm, in the middle of the strait. The connection is completed by the Drogden Tunnel, which runs the four kilometres from Peberholm to the Danish island of Amager. It’s the longest combined rail and road bridge in Europe. The massive additional cost and engineering related to digging the tunnel, rather than raising one section of the bridge, was met to avoid interfering with air traffic Copenhagen Airport, to maintain a clear channel for shipping, and to prevent ice from blocking the waters. It was originally proposed in the 1930s but dropped due to World War Two – though the legacy of the conflict did mean they uncovered sixteen unexploded bombs during construction.

  Due to the Schengen Agreement and the Nordic Passport Union, which I’d never heard of, there aren’t usually passport inspections, just random customs checks when entering Sweden. But, since January 2016, checks have become significantly more frequent due to the tightening of borders in response to the migration issues. As I travelled in the wake of Stockholm, the passport checks of every passenger were somewhat unsurprising but I didn’t realise the country had been granted a temporary Schengen exemption.

  The University, which was able to expand rapidly in part because of the bridge, provides a campus for more than twenty-four thousand students and employs about sixteen-hundred staff. It’s the 9th largest institute of learning in Sweden and has been awarded a number of honours, including that of “Centre for Excellence” in respect of dentistry. It has developed, in a relatively short number of years, exchange agreements with more than two hundred universities around the world and roughly a third of the students have an international background. It seems natural, by extension of this, that the university has a particular focus on migration, international relations, political science, sustainability, urban studies, and new media and technology.