Paulina Neuding

Sweden’s street gangs are gaining power

issue 11 March 2023

Stockholm

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.

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.

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