Sweden’s street gangs are gaining power

Barely a day goes by in Stockholm without a shooting or a bombing. In one part of the city, housing estate residents have been informed about what to do if their building is a bombing target. For all too many Swedes, this is the new normal.

Under Swedish law, children under 15 cannot be sentenced to any criminal punishment and older teenagers are seldom given more than four years in ‘compulsory care’. So mobsters now recruit young people, arm them with thermos-flask bombs or guns and send them out as soldiers in their gang wars.

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The country’s liberal criminal justice system and the fact that the police were never trained for such problems have made life comfortable for new gangs in immigrant neighbourhoods. The latest tale gripping Sweden in horror involves the suburb of Botkyrka, to the south-west of Stockholm.

Almost half of the population there lives in so-called ‘vulnerable areas’ – the police’s polite way of describing places with a majority of migrants where criminal networks exert considerable pressure on the other residents. Many of Botkyrka’s children, who are disproportionately from immigrant backgrounds, struggle in school and are easy pickings for the criminal gangs.

Few initiatives have backfired as badly as Sweden’s publicly funded ‘youth centres’. In Botkyrka, rather than keep kids off the streets, they became a base for gangland criminals. According to police, gang members – when not committing crimes – would spend night after night playing video games at the centres and gangsters had shown up wearing bulletproof vests. Weapons and drugs had also been found at the centres. The mayor, Ebba Östlin of the centre-left Social Democrats, decided last year that these places had become part of the problem and should be closed.