After a decade fighting against criminal gangs, it seems that Sweden is beginning to regain ground. “There were no shootings in May,” celebrated the headline of a newspaper after years of crisis.
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The prosperous Scandinavian state, once praised as an almost ideal society, recorded more deadly shootings per capita than any other Western European country during the last decade. Gradually, the numbers are starting to decline, although criminal gangs continue to recruit new members from minors.
The numbers are high for Scandinavia. In total, 23 innocent bystanders have died and 30 have been injured in gang shootings in Sweden over the past three years, according to statistics highlighting the country’s struggle to curb violent crime.
Sweden has been trying to contain gang violence for more than a decade, mainly linked to settling scores and disputes over control of the drug market. Among the innocent victims are people hit by stray bullets, cases of mistaken identity, and relatives of gang members who were the targets, according to police statistics.
Alexander Wallenius, operations coordinator of the Swedish police’s National Operations Department, told the local press that one reason for the number of injured bystanders is that many of the shooters are young. “We are facing very young perpetrators who, in many cases, lack prior experience in violent crimes, which leads to a higher risk of third parties or the wrong target being hit,” he said.
Swedish gangs often use social media and encrypted messaging apps to recruit teenagers whom they pay to commit crimes. Often, those recruited are under 15 years old, the age of criminal responsibility in Sweden, meaning they cannot be prosecuted and remain under social services’ care, making them valuable assets for the gangs.
However, the figures are now sharply declining as the country fights a wave of gang violence involving foreign criminals and minors as young as 12 years old. “Seeing headlines announcing that there have been no shootings this month says a lot,” Ulf Kristersson, the center-right Swedish prime minister who resigned Thursday after the center-left opposition’s victory in last Sunday’s elections, told the Financial Times.
His government sought re-election in the legislative elections boasting of having contained gang crime after four years of intense effort. This included increasing police resources, the possibility of imprisoning minors, and the arrest of criminal leaders in the Middle East and other regions.
When Kristersson came to power in 2022, there was more than one deadly shooting per week, an alarming figure for a country of just 10 million inhabitants. In the previous election year, Sweden recorded 391 shootings resulting in 62 deaths. This year, up to August 6, the figure was limited to 48 shootings and 12 deaths.
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The country’s reputation was so damaged that politicians from neighboring Denmark and Norway spoke of “Swedish conditions” to refer to everything they wanted to avoid: a spiral of crime following a period of virtually uncontrolled immigration.
Swedish gangs thrived using digital platforms to offer money to 12, 13, and 14-year-olds in exchange for committing murders or bomb attacks, both inside and outside the country.
“They started using younger kids because they saw that at 18 you got eight years in prison, but at 17, only eight months. The younger kids recruited even younger ones. Soon we were working with children as young as 12,” says Camila Salazar Atías, from Fryshuset, the country’s largest youth organization, which runs programs to prevent young people from joining gangs or helping them leave them. She adds that, for a long time, the police “could not solve the crimes, so the message was: do whatever you want.”
Swedish police and politicians say there was no single “magic solution” to reduce violence. The police changed their tactics. Previously, they investigated each shooting and bomb attack separately, often overlooking links between similar crimes.
Wallenius explains that, starting in 2024, the national police coordination center began collecting data and looking for patterns and connections between different crimes, as well as identifying instigators. Now, the police have moved beyond merely reactive action. “We try to prevent crimes and act at an early stage to, for example, arrest them for attempted homicide,” he adds. He also points out that authorities needed the collaboration of the whole society, including neighbors, businesses, “the bus driver who had a bad feeling or the hotel staff who noticed something suspicious.”
The government also allocated resources to win the favor of foreign governments in countries where many gang leaders operated. Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer, traveled extensively to strengthen ties with authorities in countries such as Tunisia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iraq. Last year, this strategy paid off with the arrest of two of the three main gang leaders: Ismail Abdo, known as “Strawberry,” in Turkey; and Mikael Tenezos, known as “The Greek,” in Mexico.
The outgoing Kristersson government, backed by the far-right Sweden Democrats party, had been pushing measures to combat crime and immigration ahead of the general elections on September 13. It had announced its intention to introduce a law requiring social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat to remove, within a maximum of one hour, “murder announcements” posted by criminal gangs, under penalty of facing heavy fines.
