I disagree. RT is very biased, but is fairly factual once you learn to ignore the bias. They do a lot of pretty impressive journalistic work, like frontline reporting. If you exclude it completely, you miss a big part of the picture.
Different media for different purposes. There are many of these highly biased "marginal" media outlets that often contain tidbits of facts that aren't reported elsewhere, and yes, sometimes it's because those facts don't match the (oppositely biased) narrative (and sometimes it's because those facts are indeed not relevant for reporting), and that's useful for surfacing these facts so you can make up your own mind. But this only works for a highly informed reader who is deeply familiar with the subject, so they can sift through the bias and pull out the facts.
BUT -- they are emphatically worse than useless for getting high-level acquainted with an unfamiliar subject, which seems to be what's at stake here.
You are assuming that there's a way for an uninformed reader to get his hands on 'unbiased' media. If you don't sift through the biases yourself the "high-level acquaintance" you acquire will be inevitably biased, since someone had to do it for you.
On the contrary, I am saying that there are no credible news to be found. Sure, RT is a mouthpiece, but it's unwise to lock yourself in a bubble where all media you consume follows the same party line.
RT factual? You must have not been following their Ukraine coverage. They're likely the biggest liars of all mainstream media. They were somewhat OK until the Ukraine crisis started, that's when they started going full-retard.
RT published an article about the Ukrainian army shooting down that Malaysian passenger plane. I am not sure if it still exists, but I have read it on their web site. Then they quickly started changing their story in followup articles, but never actually published the truth about it (unless they published it since I stopped reading them, but I seriously doubt it).
The RT mentality seems to be "the truth doesn't matter, perception is everything". It is hard to find even a hint of journalistic integrity in their work. This is far beyond being "biased". Yeah, pretty much everyone is biased, but not in the despicable way RT is.
Frankly, compared to internal Russian and Ukrainian news they were the epitome of unbiased journalism. The Ukrainian coverage was and is very subjective, but they did not resort to outright lies much more than media usually does.
Malaysian plane is a very good example of this - they were floating a lot of mad theories absolving Moscow of any guilt but in the end they were still reported just as "versions". It's very hard to catch a media company on outright lies because of such evasive tactics.
Yes, there are even worse pieces of trash than RT somewhere out there. There's a paper in my country that claims the Earth is flat, that's not the sort of media I am comparing RT to because I don't trust those papers at all either.
The New Gazette (Gorbachev's paper) is internal Russian media and did not run a full retard propaganda campaign on this issue. They printed "Forgive us, Netherlands" on their cover page. This is the paper that has had something like 5 journalists assassinated in the last decade for actually doing their job.
By presenting RT as somehow not particularly bad you are lowering the bar all the way to the ground and disrespecting thousands of honest journalists who work hard to inform the public about the wrongdoing of those in power. None of those people work for RT. RT is a pure propaganda paper. Journalists in my country have taken down people in our government and even sent them to prison by relentless digging for the truth. They have been killed in their pursuit of justice. Throwing actual journalists into the same basket with RT indicates an extremely warped perspective.
I don't think I would be too wrong to group RT journalists with the same people who instigated the Iraq war or the Libya fiasco. Sorry, but the western media that reported on "Gadaffi supplying troops with viagra to rape better" is as credible as the Kremlin mouthpiece to me.
So I assume you found the worst article you could remember, and even in this article you can at least see traces of journalistic integrity that is completely absent in RT:
> But it is a jump from that to suggesting Gaddafi is supplying troops with it to encourage mass rape.
> US ambassador Susan Rice has also said, without offering evidence, that Iran was helping Syria to suppress dissent
That's some serious mental gymnastics just to argue the old "everyone is the same" line when RT is literally a 100% propaganda paper of the Russian government.
The Guardian specifically was one of the main drivers of both Manning and Snowden leaks. They have earned the right to be called a serious paper.
And Russia was the one who shielded Snowden after his leaks went public. It does not make Putin a valiant defender of the freedom of the press, does it now?
I have seen bending of the truth happening in all major media outlets ever since I started following them, and I honestly don't want to get drawn into the measuring contest of "which newspaper lies the worst" right now. Especially since due to the absence of good metrics we'd have to do what, find and nitpick articles over the last N years? And then we'll have to argue if there are or there are not traces of "journalistic integrity"? Nah, screw that.
Even in the worst example you could cherry-pick for the Guardian, the journalist just reported on something a US official said and explicitly distanced themselves from the more ridiculous claims. This makes them as bad as RT? Ridiculous. The Guardian constantly heavily criticizes their own government, the US government, etc. They are clearly not tools of the people in power.
RT on the other hand just does whatever is in the interest of the Russian government. The only reason it even exists is to try to push narratives favorable for the Russian government to a western audience. They're just a tool.
It requires some serious personal bias in order to see the two papers as the same.
Snowden/Putin is irrelevant as Snowden leaking that stuff was favorable for Putin. At the same time, the Guardian publishing it was not favorable for their government.
New Gazette is english translation, ru-english is "Novaya Gazeta"
The five journalist you mentioned are on this list https://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/ with
over 50 russian journalist killed, and not a single one is from RT, I wonder why...
The things you said apply to most western media. The difference is that RT is basically controlled by the Russian state, while most western media lie for their own profit.
This one is back from the time of the siege of Aleppo last year. Frontline reporting is probably even more biased than anything else. Journalist speaking against the soldiers he's embedded with? What will happen next time he's embedded with any troops?
Correct me if I am wrong, but it's just about the thumbnail inappropriately used in one of the videos. Not about the report itself or the factual errors in it. Just the thumbnail which was probably assigned from some stock of "Syrian war destruction photos". That's sounds more like sloppy work than a deliberate lie.
Also the entire RT reporting about Syria is a factual error. They omit so much, it's ridiculous. Russia last fall/winter killed around 4000 civilians in Syria, before they scaled back this year. Where are detailed reports on those reported on RT?
Google "site:rt.com russia massacres" and have fun finding something perpetrated by Russia's military there, even playing it down as an accident.
Individuals, professionalism and reputation is what makes news outlets credible, and real competition between news agencies is the very key for that to work, so without a free press environment, news are unreliable.
I tried to separate recent crime statistics from the rest of the paper. Turns out there weren't many:
the level [of lethal violence] in 2015 – when a total of 112 cases of lethal violence were reported – was higher than for many years.
lethal violence using firearms has increased within the context of criminal conflicts. The number of confirmed or suspected shootings was 20 per cent higher in 2014 than in 2006. The statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33.
The number of reported rapes in Sweden has risen.
some 13 per cent of the population were the victim of an offence against them personally in 2015. This is an increase on preceding years, although it is roughly the same level as in 2005.
In a report published in February 2016, the Swedish Police Authority identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity.
This part atleast, as explained to me, is because rape has a much wider statistical definition. All sexual assault supposedly is classified under it, penetration not required.
The last time the rape law was significantly changed, according to Wikipedia, was in 2005(legislature) and 2008(Supreme Court case). I couldn't read whether the government article cited a source for the law changes(don't know Swedish), so that's the best I have.
Precisely, there are no statistics from 2016, they published the old information.
And if the statistics are done like in France, they aren't even allowed to note which religion the suspect has, so some simple statistics that would give such a relation are by definition not possible to make.
On one side, it's true, the free society is not supposed to look in the people's heads. On another side, if the perpetrators explicitly tell you why they do what they do, it's really, really wrong discarding that information.
The policies that disallow the access to the non-biased facts are serious limitation in more than one land. As an example in the US, there's this 2001 "Guideline" for the "professional journalists":
> the level [of lethal violence] in 2015 – when a total of 112 cases of lethal violence were reported – was higher than for many years.
> he statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33.
This is the part that's ironic - if the US had the same per-capita lethal violence rate as Sweeden except for immigrants who we'll assume murder 100 times as often, it would still be a lot safer than the US is currently!
Claim: "In Sweden there are a number of 'no-go zones' where criminality and gangs have taken over and where the emergency services do not dare to go."
Facts: No. In a report published in February 2016, the Swedish Police Authority identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity. These places have been incorrectly labelled 'no-go zones'. What is true, however, is that in several of these areas the police have experienced difficulties fulfilling their duties; but it is not the case that the police do not go to them or that Swedish law does not apply there
Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right?
And I don't know if it is the same in Sweden, but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods. So again, nothing to worry about.
Well according to this article, crime across the whole country has gone down, so who really cares if there are pockets where the violence is so bad that police can't do their job?
I mean, who cares if there are 30 gernade attacks in Malmo [0] as long as overall deaths in Stockholm habe gone down by more than 30?
"The number of confirmed or suspected shootings was 20 per cent higher in 2014 than in 2006. The statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33."
does anyone else find it strange how they keep jumping around in (what feels like arbitrary) years?
Exactly. We worry about those pockets of crime/violence and the media attention is disproportionate here too. The international attention is just mind blowing seeing as nothing has changed over the last decade (these areas were shit 10 years ago too!). But all this doesn't mean the country suddenly is on the verge of collapse.
Yes it's true: there are pockets where Ambulances are stoned by local kids and need police escorts. That's not a vicious rumor. It's a tiny area (few blocks) of the country though. I'm sure many countries have terrible areas.
How our areas somehow turned on ambulance and firefighters is a complete mystery to me though.
Those links are only to illustrate what people claim happen. They're not necessarily representative of what things are actually like. Talking to people who live in these places is just about the only way to get a good idea.
Reports of youths stoning firemen are in the newspaper every couple of months in my UK city. Firemen report it as truth too, it has been specifically mentioned when I've visited fire stations (Scout visits).
The youths are never charged from what I can tell, the police just disperse them. I assume this means the incidents don't go in to crime statistics.
That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps; that may be over-cynical.
> That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps
It is overly cynical.
The UK has two sets of crime statistics: police recorded crime and the annual crime survey.
Even the police recorded crime stats (which aren't regarded as statistically reliable) don't only rely on arrests, but include all reported crimes. So police arresting or not wouldn't affect the numbers.
But the annual crime survey (which is statistically reliable) doesn't rely on police recording.
> Same as in Belgium then. They even throw stones at fire-fighters when they are doing their job. So nothing to worry about, right?
Who reports that people do that? Tabloid newspapers? They've been lying about that for decades.
After the 1989 Hillsbourogh disaster (where people died due to health & safety issues, and negligence from the police), tabloid newspaper The Sun wrote a full page headline accusing Liverpool fans of attacking police who were trying to save people. It was a complete fabrication.
"Those people" attacking our police/first responders is a common lie that sells tabloid newspapers.
Plenty of sources tell us that emergency services in metropolitan areas in Sweden wear protective vests. There are cost issues, and there are image issues, i.e. if the firemen are protected against you stabbing them, it's "militarization" and you'll see them as your enemy.
In your Twitter account, you seem ready enough to admit the reality of political violence, and even to commend it. (Retweet: "If US folks wanna see more nazi punching, just look at the attempted Pegida rally last year in Dublin. alt-hugs given freely")
By _protesters_ against other _protesters_. There's surely a difference between someone at a political rally being punched by someone with a different political opinion (especially by someone from the "black block", which largely serves to make these crimes harder to attach to a single individual), and LEOs or EMTs being attacked during routine circumstances.
I don't quite understand you. Are you saying that attacking political activists is more acceptable than attacking someone during "routine circumstances" (such as a pub brawl, I presume)?
I live in Finland, where our criminal code actually has a separate crime called "infringement of freedom to political activity", for threat of violence or endangering well-being of others who express their opinion, participate a demonstration or set up an association for peaceful political activity. So attacking someone at a political rally is a worse crime than a random violent attack.
To avoid misunderstanding, are you saying that it's acceptable to physically assault people because of their opinion, or do you "agree" with something else?
Having myself been attacked by a frothing gang of leftist 'protesters' at a legitimate and absolutely peaceful demonstration, I guarantee you, I can see the problem.
Remember when all the German press reported that firefighters were kept out of a left-wing squat in Berlin after a girl died there, and then the next day the fire department had to clarify that this wasn't what happened at all? This was a couple months ago, probably the sort of incident you were thinking of.
Lies are rampant. Especially racist anti-immigrant lies:
You can say whatever you want. What's important and this release is trying to demonstrate is that if you're going to make claims then provide the evidence.
Sure you could blame Muslims for those no-go areas. But you need to demonstrate it. And demonstrate absent other factors like socioeconomic status, unemployment rate etc.
No, not like that at the fucking all. I live in Stockholm, I just came today to my home from a friend's place that is in one of these pesky little maps marking it as a "no-go zone". Seriously, there's nothing alarming there at all, it's a very normal area a little bit outside the center with more affordable housing (compared to the center of Stockholm but not even near "cheap") and that's about it.
I've stayed on that friend's house for the whole of January, daily living there and haven't heard about a single crime happening. Asked my friend's flatmates just now and they laughed about it.
Same thing for a friend that lives inside what some maps label as "no-go zone" in Kista, nothing happened there at all for the past year.
So seriously, the alarmism here is very extrapolated compared to the actual risk. Compare to Belgium as you want but be a bit more honest about your utter ignorance instead of just a "And I don't know about Sweden"-trumpesque discourse.
I don't know about Sweden, but in Finland the number of firebomb/grenade attacks increased a lot in the past few years. All of them due Finnish born right wing zealots trying to burn down the shelters housing the refugees.
Luckily there seems to be less attacks in the last half a year.
I think there's been more attacks, but here's a summary of some of them: http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 (Dec 2015, in finnish)
Reading your link I counted a hundred and twenty in 19 years. For about 9 million people in Sweden, that's a 120/(19 * 9 * 10^6) change of something happening each year. That's insanely small, compared to, say, the amount of people dying in bathtubs while intoxicated, which works out to 4377/(19 * 9 * 10^6) assuming this is a stagnant problem.
(http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...)
Look, I'm fully aware you need to panic, and I'm fully aware this need is being satisfied by a bunch of cronies standing to make heaps of money on your panic. Just know your fear is not justified and should not be the reason for aiding the raise of fascism in europe.
The Yugoslav mafia is well established in parts of Sweden; mostly in rural areas that the government seem to have forgotten exist. The rest is just supply and demand; mostly demand from Somali crime gangs.
From what I'm aware of, grenade attacks mostly occur between gangs in Malmö and some areas of Skåne and Göteborg. I'm not a Swedish national, I'm an expat living here so I don't have the whole story behind these gangs and why they mostly gathered around Göteborg and Malmö but not Stockholm.
What I know is that these grenades came from the Balkans after the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, now why is it so common for it to happen in Sweden of all countries I honestly don't know.
why is it so common for it to happen in Sweden of all countries I honestly don't know
One theory is that due to a quirk in the way the law is worded, grenades where not considered weapons, but rather a controlled explosive[0]. What this means in practice is that the punishment for smuggling hand grenades into the country is much much lower than the punishment for smuggling in guns. As the law is written, if you are first time offender caught with a hand grenade you're likely to get away with a fine.
Leftover Yugoslavian M75s. They're easy to get across borders and there's a demand for them among certain groups of people.
Semi-related: A significant amount of illegal firearms in Europe (including the firearms used in recent attacks) were sold legally in Slovakia as "deactivated acoustic expansion weapons" and then "reactivated".
My guess since they mentioned the Kista area: Husby, Rinkeby or Akalla. Maybe Hallonbergen. I lived in Solna for a while, studying at KTH in Kista. I've spent a fair bit of time in and around these areas and I can't say I've ever felt unsafe in them. Whenever people talk about these areas as no-go zones or areas where if you enter you'll probably be mugged, stabbed, shot, raped, or worse, I wonder if they've ever been there at all.
I don't live in Sweden so I don't have a great perspective to corroborate or rebut what you are saying. Instead, I googled "Kista sweden crime" with a filter for -1 year, and also searched for "Kista" in the one Swedish newspaper that I know of, "Aftonbladet", using google translate to confirm that an article was about a crime.
The google results were mostly commentary, the only useful report I could get out of them was this one:
Honest question, not trying to troll. Would you be comfortable walking in those neighborhoods wearing a yamaka or holding hands with / displaying affection to a member of the same sex?
Car burning seems to be a hobby in Sweden these days. A few days ago police arrested a suspect on a drug charge in Rinkeby and five hour riots erupted. Torching cars, looting businesses, throwing rocks at police, beating up journalists. How Swedish of them.
Same thing in August last year in Husby (a suburb in northern Stockholm), 47 cars torched. Same suburb that saw the same violent riots and more than 100 cars torched in May 2013.
Was there a single riot like that in Sweden that does not involve immigrants? Were there any honor killings that don't involve immigrants from specific part of the world?
And you don't think that certainly more than half a billion africans would deserve to live a much better live than what is possible where they live now? Solution imho only can be to 'fix' those countries and 'fix' the birthrates.
Globalization also means that certain customs no longer are tolerable...
There are areas in Dublin where children and teenagers throw stones at fire brigades and they are certainly not immigrants. These are old white Irish areas. What sets them apart is high levels of unemployment, poverty and under employment.
What sets the no-go zones apart in places like Sweden is that, not only are they filled with poor unemployed people, but those people have a different ideology and come from third world countries, and therefore the crimes perpetrated are different from that of the indigenous population. There isn't even a street in Dublin in which that's the case.
There are certainly places in Dublin where you might be more likely to get yourself robbed in, but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? Nowhere.
but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl?
And where are you suggesting such a place does exist? In Sweden? If you have any links to reports of incidents like you're describing I'd love to see them.
I've seen scores of videos on Youtube showing that these attacks, if not normal, do happen at least in Sweden. You can read the stats in the thread again for proof, or search for videos yourself if you don't believe the stats.
And I can anecdotally state that I've witnessed attacks first hand in Muslim areas in both Belgium and France due to ideological reasons (e.g. a girl in my party was assaulted because she touched a man's arm and apparently shouldn't have). I've lived in the worst parts of Dublin and yeah, problems can arise, but they're non-ideological ones. Which means that you can avoid them by using general street smarts.
I think one of the problems when talking about these issues is the frame of reference.
I have lived in the most dangerous part of our town (Linköping) for several years. I come from Latvia where a 'dangerous' part of a town meant that you do not go there because you will be robbed / knifed / shot in broad daylight. It was absolutely not the case with the most dangerous part of Linköping, even though people who had not had a direct experience with the place kept talking about it in the same way as I would talk about a true 'no-go' zone in Latvia. The worst thing that happened to me there was that my bicycle got stolen because I had forgotten to lock it overnight. My kid was playing outside unsupervised every day, I was coming home alone in the middle of night etc. Never had a single unpleasant experience.
The same is true about rape. In Sweden, the definition of rape and sexual abuse is incredibly broad. I know a person who got accused of sexual abuse by his wife because she said he had slipped up a finger in her vagina while asleep without her consent. Once. Several years ago. Can you imagine any other country where a case like this would ever be looked at even remotely seriously? Moreover, incidents involving sexual abuse are reported a lot more often, because everyone is a lot more informed about what consent means and what their rights are. It is highly unusual in the global context. So rape in Sweden is nothing like rape pretty much anywhere else in the world.
I could talk a lot more about these issues, but these two points are the most important to keep in mind when discussing crime in Sweden relative to crime everywhere else in the world.
"but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods"
It would help because those things are mostly done by the youth born there. Most migrants in a small (2sq miles although some like to extrapolate it to the whole country) community like Molenbeek (where most of those problems originate) are second generation or more. We are way past the point where it's a migration problem or where a migration stop would help.
I don't know how closing our borders or my absolute favourite "sending them back to their country of origin" (which will result in an infinite loop) will really help.
But then again for some we are not allowed to point to socio-economic problems, they pretend that it simply doesn't exist or it's the complete fault of the other side. What I often see in Belgium is the argument that Mohammed should find a job or that most are lazy.
But from the moment we the see the name on his resume or he shows up to do our garage door installation, it's a big "no-go" also. It's a vicious circle that works both ways.
100% agree with you. It's a problem that is not easily fixed.
Taking about the vicious circle, I heard of a company that basically discards any resume with a male Arabic name in it, because they had lots of problems with that group in the past, but not for the women. Too bad for the Mohammed who wants to do a good job of course.
Very hard problem, but it all starts with being totally honest about the situation.
Most are forced to correlate crime and migration because they can't write online that the real thing bothering Westerners is the virulent growth of an anachronistic religion that makes both men and women subservient to an old book or wizard in the sky. Somehow we'll find a few fellows here defending the increasing percentage of women completely dressed as ninjas as something natural in modern societies. Neglecting the violence that happens to them when they don't dress that way.
HN, it's time to be honest. That's the real elephant in the room.
It's not the police who are labelling (or, more importantly, treating) these zones as "no go", that label has been applied by other parties, such as tabloid press.
Quite happy to see official sources at least trying to put the foot down regarding all this weirdness (I am Swedish).
You have a few no-go zones in France, e.g. in the Northern districts of Marseille, where the police does not go except for big operations as it is too dangerous. It looks like it is not the case in Sweden as the police can still go everywhere, even if some districts are more dangerous than others.
I remember hearing something similar from a policeman here in Scotland ~30 years ago - to arrest someone who they expected to be violent from a high-rise in a rougher area would need a remarkable number of people involved as they didn't want to let anyone be out of sight of anyone else so that meant someone standing on each landing on the stairs.
And that's nothing to do with immigrants just us Scots and our unfortunate propensity for violence (see: radge).
There are areas like this in most countries. And it's most often linked to poverty, youth unemployment, the stability of the family home and absence of good role models.
But instead people like to blame immigrants because it's easier. It's always that faceless person over there who is responsible for your problems.
No one is contesting that either. Areas like this become like this because of poverty and unemployment. Sweden has a system of very high entry level wages making the threshold for getting a job very high. If you immigrated from Somalia the chance that you have a job a decade later is around zero. So in a way this comes as an unfortunate result of success rather than failure. We "could afford" having migrants, and we have had the luxury of high entry wages.
The fact that this leads to massive segregation and thus integration problems is the downside we haven't figured out.
Guadaloupe (a French island dominion in the Caribbean) has neighborhoods like this (black communities -- most of the black people descend from former slaves and have been there for generations). I heard about this on a podcast discussing a recent finding that the Guadaloupe Raccoon was actually the same species as the common North American raccoon and was hence subject to EU pest control regulations.
The Guadaloupe raccoon had been a common pet up to then -- and police began raiding neighborhoods with large teams to take people's pet raccoons into custody. These raids were often quite tense and dangerous.
I mention this to provide a case which demonstrates 'no go zones' that do not involve immigration. Its my guess that immigration is almost never the cause of a no-go-zone neighborhood -- I think such neighborhoods are almost always the result of real systemic social biases that cause socio-economic problems.
VICE made a pretty good material about no-go zones in Sweden and anti-racist groups that demolish your car, house, get you fired from job for liking wrong thing on Facebook.
>But you certainly don't have any right to be publicly racist and expect no retaliation.
Seriously, demolishing someone's car/house is not worth mentioning in your comment, but have no right to be publicly racist? I also didn't say it was racist, where did you take this from?
Also, what's your address because I disagree and would like to put an axe on your front door.
I didn't mean to say that it's ok to burn down someone's car or a house. But retaliation within legal means is to be expected.
Not sure about Sweden, but in my country being publicly racist[1] would be viewed as a crime[2]. I don't think anyone expects employers to continue employing active criminals.
>I also didn't say it was racist, where did you take this from?
>anti-racist groups ... get you fired from job for liking wrong thing on Facebook
Presumably, anti-racist group would take offense to people liking racist things on Facebook (otherwise, why describe them as anti-racist as opposed to anti-'whatever it is you like on Facebook that they have issues with')?
1 - defined as: "Who founds, supports or propagates a movement that provably aims to suppress freedoms and rights of man, or preaches racial, ethnic, national, religious or class hatred, or hatred against another group of people, will be punished by 1 to 5 years of prison."
2 - in reality you'd probably be sued for it only if you pissed off someone with the money/time to spend on the legal procedures
That kind of law leads to self-censorship of things that wouldn't even be illegal, simply because nobody will risk stepping near the line. A good deal of factual and political speech gets wiped out.
If your country is typical of the sort of Western nation with that kind of law, then "1 to 5 years of prison" is more than you'd get for rape. That's quite some fear of words.
Here in the USA, we mostly laugh at the actual hate groups. Your country has made them a forbidden fruit, all the more enticing. You also can't know people's true feelings... you might discover them abruptly someday, in a very bad way.
Straight from the horse's mouth (cops in this case). tl;dw they wear bulletproof vests and helmes in Malmö (BP vests are really rare on nordic police officers compared to the US)
That link includes video interviews with Stockholm police (not Malmö), with one police officer claiming they experience Police Fishing ("polis-fishing"), fake calls designed to bring the police to a specific location, where they are ambushed by locals who attack them by throwing stones at them ("steinkasting").
The report also mentions "no go-zones", but I can't find any mention of that specific phrase in the Swedish Police PDF that NRK link to and use as their reference.
It's strangely worded because "no-go area" is a dog-whistle that means a lot more to certain groups than others.
There's a whole bunch of people who think Muslims are secretly taking over western nations, and being aided by Jews. As part of that they believe they are literally setting up whole cities under Islamic law.
This is why Obama not being born in Kenya can seem like political trivia to one person, but evidence of a wide ranging conspiracy to another.
"Sharia" and "Muslim brotherhood" are a couple of other terms that have resonances you're probably not aware of amongst the "counter-jihadi" movement.
You can use them any way you want, just be aware when you do that some people think Dearborn in Michigan, or Birmingham in the UK are currently no-go areas for anyone who is not a conservative muslim, so any mention of Sharia which isn't a condemnation basically means you approve of this scenario and are part of the conspiracy to bring down the west.
And this conspiracy goes right to the top. The current president of the USA accused the previous president of the USA live on national television of helping to organise a terrorist shooting in a Florida nightclub. Hilarious right? What a wacky character. Not so funny when you realise large numbers of people literally believe this to be the case.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can you make commit atrocities" -- Voltaire.
You keep alluding to what other people will think if the topics are discussed. I am asking you if there is a context in which these topics are open to discussion without judgement and categorization?
Can we have a discussion of Sharia that is both critical and allowed? Can I be critical of it and not be a conspiracy theorist and not be a Trump supporter?
P.S. Where can I find the full list of topics not to be discussed?
Ah, you caught me out. I was only pretending when I said "You can use them any way you want". In fact you're not allowed to discuss any topics. You seem to interpret everything anyone says as an attempt to censor you, so it will only be fruitless and aggravating for people to attempt to converse with you in good faith anyway.
Everyone else though, will be aware that words can have unexpected connotations, like the use of the word "thugs" or "religious freedom" or "globalist bankers" in modern american politics, and can adjust accordingly.
What's weird about it? They deny that there's such a thing as a no-go zone in Sweden. Fits with my experience, as I've never encountered a place in Sweden that felt like that. Contrast that with here in Chicago, where there are neighborhoods where I will not go in broad daylight, even though they are not labeled no-go zones.
Seriously, we need to get a sense of perspective.
Edit: see also, perspective from Latvia in this thread.
Chicago has no-go zones, and no-go zones are always bad.
The difference here is that Sweden is creating new no-go zones. However that happens (in this case immigration) it is really bad. If a government policy would create new no-go zones, then that government policy is bad. Stop it!
Fixing the older no-go zones is a different problem. It is important, but a lower priority than not creating new no-go zones.
It's like... close the plug in the bottom of your boat before worrying about the water that is already there.
Especially when you consider that "53 residential areas" are way beyond what the Swedish government and law enforcement can control and contain. In a properly ran country, this would pose some kind of state emergency, but they keep ignoring it.
It's a bit simplistic to speak only about migrants.
In the case of Islamic terrorism, I've heard it commented that recruits come from the children of migrants rather than the migrants themselves.
This certainly seemed to borne out by the London 7/7 bombers and the Charlie Hebdo attackers to name two cases.
Prison populations in western countries also seem to have disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities.
I also heard that Canada refuses to break down crime figures by ethnicity/race as a matter of public policy. If that is true it seems that there is a fear that the figures might look bad for minorities.
In the interests of community harmony, authorities commonly seem to want to accentuate the positive and sweep any negativity under the rug.
I understand that one motivation behind not providing crime breakdowns by ethnicity is to avoid providing information that might be used without context to justify hate.
But it is also a little racist to try to hide the problem, as if criminality is inherent to the ethnicity and cannot be solved, so may as well be ignored.
Quite true - and the level of Orwellian thought-control that bureaucrats are engaging in, in order to hide facts because it might "justify hate" - is much more terrifying than the hate itself.
Collecting data about ethnicity is always problematic because the definitions are fundamentally fluid.
Finnish people were considered Asian in some American states in the early 20th century. Should they be included in crime statistics with Chinese?
Also, if police are required to collect this data, who else is? Should you be able to look up the registered ethnicity of a person similar to how anyone can look up tax returns in Sweden (and other Nordic countries)? If not, why not?
Not sure what stats back up this claim. I've heard people say this movement is anti-globalization, about the economy, anti-PC, anti-establishment - yadda yadda yadda. Everyone has a theory, and it seems like people just choose the one they like best.
Trump at the moment has a very low approval rating - maybe not everyone got what they read into him?
Most analysis showed he had some chance of winning, and he won by a relatively low margin.
If you rolled a ten sided dice once and it came up with a ten, would you feel repeated tests that showed there was a 10% chance of that outcome should be ignored in future?
If the polls had said "0.1% chance", I would agree with you. But a 10% chance is actually quite high odds. Things much less likely than that happen to everyone, every day.
The predictions were essentially right. Hillary Clinton had a better chance of winning the election, but Trump successfully rolled the dice with his 10% odds: he campaigned in some critical states that were expected to go blue and won them over by a narrow majority.
So now I'm confused. Does a low approval rate matter, is it "bad data"? What defines "bad data"? Say the statistics running around this thread specifically about crime in countries, broken down by race and type or crime, or broken down further by region within counties too. How does one determine "good data" vs "bad data" here?
Sorry you're confused. Point was pretty clear: US polling data was not found to correlate strongly with reality, so treat it with some suspicion. Can't really break it down further than that.
Polling was incapable of accurately determining what the odds really were. If that die was six-side, but I told you there was a consistent 10% chance of rolling a 1, then I'm providing you with a bad probability. The media and pollsters did the same (for whatever reason).
>Polling was incapable of accurately determining what the odds really were.
Nope.
If polling couldn't determine what the odds really were, the probabilities, which showed it was well within the realm of possibility that trump would win, aren't evidence the polls were out of alignment with reality.
Semantics at this point. I'll rephrase your comment with consistent terms:
If polling couldn't determine what the odds really were, the odds, which showed it was well within the realm of possibility that trump would win, aren't evidence the polls were out of alignment with reality.
The possibility of Trump winning does not exonerate the accuracy of the odds presented by polls. The odds were not correct, and the polling data was flawed.
>The possibility of Trump winning does not exonerate the accuracy of the odds presented by polls. The odds were not correct, and the polling data was flawed.
If there are 10% odds of something happening and it happens after one event, that's absolutely not a reason to say the data points that generated the odds are flawed.
Clinton ended up with a 2.1% victory; the RCP polling average before the election was 3.2% in favor of Clinton. So a 1.1% difference, which isn't huge. Some of that might be explained by the Comey announcement as well.
The polling data was that it is possible for it to occur, although unlikely. It occurred. I'm not sure where the data said otherwise, or where it isn't correlating with reality.
That's how people interpreted the polls. But there were a lot of people who said that assigning a probability to the election was a foolish thing to do.
Also worth noting that accurate national polls wouldn't have captured a Trump victory (since Clinton lead in the popular vote). You would need state polls, but they're not always accurate. Trump's win in Michigan was a big surprise, but so was Sanders' win in Michigan a few months earlier.
Your backswing is just the same old bigots getting a momentary upper hand because of the way the chips happened to fall in the last election. Whether they can leverage that into more lasting power remains to be seen.
... authorities commonly seem to want to accentuate the positive and sweep any negativity under the rug.
Like the Trump administration, and the Hungarian government... No, wait, they do the exact opposite. I guess all authorities are not the same after all? And it's not just black and white either. Governments around the world consist of people with incredibly different backgrounds and political agendas. There is no single "authorities".
It is a common refrain these days that governments are trying to hide the facts to advance some kind of shadowy globalist agenda. It's good to be critical, but you need to be equally critical of sources that claim to be telling you the real truth.
Your comment contains three claims, and they're all either "I heard" or "seem to have". We should try to do better.
Many European countries also ban the collection (not just publication) of any statistics that involve ethnicity. Not just statistics on ethnicity and crime, but even simple demographic statistics (how many people in this city are X) are banned, regardless of how those stats are collected.
Sure you need to be critical - but in both directions.
If you want to see the government trying to hide things, just look at Sylvester in Cologne and how long it took officials and the german TV channels to report/acknowledge what happened. If this information hadn't spread on Facebook, who knows if we would have ever known.
I am Austrian and until the migration crisis I've never felt misinformed. (BTW: Austria took more refugees per capita in than Germany) But this crisis changed that. It seemed the public media didn't just report, they wanted to persuade people to the right course. This is also about subtle things and therefore hard to prove: According to statistic refugees were about 70% male, but who was almost exclusively on the frontpage? Only women and children.
I can handle dubious or stupid Twitter/Facebook comments and chit-cat about what refugees supposedly did. The shocking thing was that public media was so one-sided. It is no coincidence that the name "lying press" got popular at this time. IMHO this was a general feeling that people had. That they didn't get the full story.
I thought that phrase was relative to financial markets, not a general thing.
My feeling is that things will get worse. But by then we will have climate change starting to hit, and an unsustainable population. I guess I am pretty skeptical about the future overall.
According to the official statistics on The Swedish Crime Survey, the sexual violence rate in Sweden remained about the same between 2005 and 2014. The refugee crisis began around 2014, and since then, the rates for sexual violence went down in 2015[1] something you never see mentioned on certain parts of the internet. 2016 saw an increase in crimes, but still less than pre-immigration levels in 2014.
Also the Swedish national council for crime prevention expected this rise over the last few years because in 2013(before there was a serious influx of migrants) Sweden broadened the definition of rape. A similar increase in crime was seen around 2006 because of 'legislative changes' about how things were recorded.
In the US research on the link between immigration and crime largely find no link between the two[2], and of the relative minority of studies that find a link, there are twice as many studies that find that increased migration reduces crime as the reverse.
In Germany, refugees are less likely to commit a crime than the average citizen[3]. From the publicly available information it is impossible to conclude with certainty that taking in refugees increases crime, especially considering that the vast majority of 'crimes' they do commit are non-violent things like not travelling with a ticket.[3]
What is rarely mentioned is the increasing crimes committed against refugees in refugee camps. In germany, there were 1,029 attacks against refugee residences in 2015, following 199 in 2014. Attacks on refugees increase the crime rate themselves.
Thank you for the actual statistics; can you provide a source for the legislative change? I found sources for 2005 and 2008 changes, but not one for 2013.
There's also one particular thing that doesn't pass the smell test for me from your German article:
"Less than 1 percent of the total crimes committed by refugees are sex crimes, going against rumours spread on social media that these have become more common with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees."
Here, the title is that "refugees commit less crime than Germans". However, the stats they quote show otherwise - despite refugees being anywhere from 0.8 to 2%, they committed at least 4% of the sex crimes in the country - a factor of at least 2. The article itself says that the sexual assaults reported during the New Year's Eve were not part of this number, so this is a conservative estimate. The article quotes a ratio of 2:1 men over women as a mitigating factor, however, doing the math most favorably towards refugees(100% of sexual assaults committed by men, 40/60 split in men/women in Germany) leaves you with an adjusted rate of ~2.6% of crimes, still significantly higher than their proportionate population.
From that article though I was able to acquire this statistic for 2015:
"The total number of this type of crime committed nationwide throughout 2015 was almost 47,000"
From here - https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=170... - I found that the total criminal offenses in germany were close to ~6mil. From this you can calculate the rate of sexual assault for the german population - 47k / 6mil ~ 0.8%. It's not as significantly different from the previous number, but still doesn't support the claim that, at 1%, refugees commit less sexual crimes than the german population.
EDIT: There is also a mitigating factor I just thought of that the newspaper didn't mention; refugees are likely to have a poor economic status in Germany, and are thus more likely to commit crimes for that factor alone. I don't know how to calculate for that as well.
The original German article quoting the actual internal police paper is very clear that out of the "very low six digit figure" of total crimes committed by refugees, less than 1% of those "refugee crimes" were sex crimes.
It does not in any way state the what chunk out of the total sex crimes were committed by refugees, indeed.
I figured the same (the original Welt article thelocal.de quotes does not even say "refugees commit less crime than Germans" btw).
So, "less than 1%" of the "very low six figure" number of total crimes committed by refugees are sex crimes.
Ok then, so let's conservatively say it's 100,000 * 0.009 = 900 sex crimes (not sure about what time range that even covers? 1 year? First 9 months in 2015 since the report was compiled in Oct 2016).
There have been 7022 sex crimes (reported) in 2015[1], total.
Using that, the conservative estimate for sex crimes committed by refugees of the total sex crimes committed is:
900 / 7022 = 12.8%
Let's assume (and grossly overestimate really) there were about 1.5 million refugees total in (the end of) 2015 and a total population of 81 million.
So 1.8% of the population was refugees, yet that cohort committed 12% of sex crimes.
But 900 / 1.5M refugees is a at most 0.06% of refugees (not even considering multiple offenders) who commit sex crimes, compared to the total population rate of 7022 / 81M = 0.009%
Downplaying the issue is not helpful. On the other hand, it's not helpful either but actually dangerous to rubberstamp all refugees as sex offenders when only at most 0.06% of them committed a sex crime in 2015.
As pointed out already, there are many mitigating factors to put this into context.
But I wasn't contesting that at all? I was taking the number of 1.1%, quoted as purportedly "really low", and trying to extrapolate what the number of sexual assaults is among the population at large. Like my last paragraph says, that extrapolation is around 0.8%, still not enough to justify a title "refugees commit less crime than Germans". The report you linked doesn't help me at all, only providing an even larger number than I started with for migrant crimes.
In fact, the report just reaffirmed what I've already heard elsewhere - the vast majority of crimes come not from "Syrian refugees", but migrants from countries without a crisis that would lead to them seeking asylum. This has been a very common criticism of the "floodgate" approach to accepting all immigrants regardless of their ability to justify their refugee status.
>The report you linked doesn't help me at all, only providing an even larger number than I started with for migrant crimes.
The report is the only thing that actually matters in this context because it's the actual data. All your sources are just news-outlets trying to interpret data from sources they don't even share with the reader.
>but migrants from countries without a crisis that would lead to them seeking asylum
And half these countries are not even "Muslim countries", yet they are overrepresented in the crime rates, while people from countries like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are proportionally lower with their crime rates. Which goes straight against the common misconception of "It's their Islamic culture that makes them so criminal and incompatible to our culture!".
> This has been a very common criticism of the "floodgate" approach to accepting all immigrants regardless of their ability to justify their refugee status.
You first have to accept them to check if they actually qualify for refugee status, those that don't qualify don't get the status and thus have to leave the country.
How else would you want to handle this? Leave them all outside the border so they create their own communities, without any infrastructure or law enforcement? Do you seriously think creating these kinds of "slums" would be beneficial to anybody?
>You first have to accept them to check if they actually qualify for refugee status, those that don't qualify don't get the status and thus have to leave the country.
Then what? THEN they go back to the border and they create their own communities? How can you __actually__ make that many people leave?
>Do you seriously think creating these kinds of "slums" would be beneficial to anybody?
No, but the fact is these refugees are not able to contribute to the societies they come to in a meaningful way. For instance, in Germany only 1 in 10,000 refugees that arrived last year are employed. Is accepting a large quantity of people, most of whom do not have the kind of formal education required to be successful in a highly developed economy, beneficial to anybody? What's the end-game for this?
>Then what? THEN they go back to the border and they create their own communities? How can you __actually__ make that many people leave?
I never claimed the system is perfect because there is no perfect system for such complex problems.
>No, but the fact is these refugees are not able to contribute to the societies they come to in a meaningful way. For instance, in Germany only 1 in 10,000 refugees that arrived last year are employed.
That's because they are legally not allowed to work until their status has been cleared. It's not a matter of them "not wanting to work", it's a matter of not having the right status to work.
The other alternative, one that many populist right-wingers are advocating for, is forcing them to work even when their refugee status is still not cleared up.
But that would actually wreck havoc on labor wages because then you'd suddenly have created a whole new class of people that would work far below average wages just to "justify" their stay in the country. Do I really need to spell out what that would mean for the average low-income worker in the country? Average wages would be pushed even lower than they already are, which has already been a growing problem in Germany for over a decade.
There are no easy solutions to any of this, people who claim there are easy solutions are simply deluding themselves about the long-term ramifications of their solutions.
And no: Just "not letting them in" also ain't no solution, these people won't simply "disappear" just because you hide them behind big fences and walls.
No matter how you frame it, "globalizations" and freedom of movement has it's advantages and brings a lot of positive changes. As somebody who crossed the "Iron curtain" several times, when it still existed, I hardly wish those times back. It would be a step back for Europe and humanity as a whole. Fences and walls don't solve problems, they only compartmentalize them.
>I never claimed the system is perfect because there is no perfect system for such complex problems.
Agreed. But my real problem here is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of plan. There are many questions that need to be answered, among these:
1. Should a country accept refugees? If yes, how many?
2. Are these refugees permanent residents? If not, what is the timeline of their departure?
3. How do we integrate thousands of people with very diverse backgrounds into our system?
>That's because they are legally not allowed to work until their status has been cleared.
Finding concrete numbers on this issue is surprisingly difficult. I have found from a few different sources that only 13% of in-status refugees have found work. Again, there are real challenges in integrating refugees, and there is no clear plan for how this is to be accomplished.
>these people won't simply "disappear" just because you hide them behind big fences and walls.
Agreed, and something should be done to help them. But I think that the default shouldn't be to let them in. That's foolhardy, especially when governments don't have clear policy answering the questions that I have asked.
In the absence of a clear plan regarding the status of refugees, I can't help but feel that it is irresponsible to accept all. It will require real, concentrated efforts by a government to make a refugee system work in the interests of both refugees and citizens, although I agree that it is an effort worth making.
I respect your experiences with free movement. We agree that we don't desire for "iron curtains" to be re-established. Coming up with an approach to these problems that works is beyond my skill set -- I only hope to see that those who come up with possible systems are able to clearly articulate their details, strengths and weaknesses, and allow the people to make a choice from a selection of systems.
EDIT: I am also going to add that I am aware that some of these questions have definite legal answers, but given that there is so much turbulence and desire to modify existing legal systems that predate the current refugees-crisis, there is a lack of certainty and dialog regarding policy designed to face today's issues.
> In Germany, refugees are less likely to commit a crime than the average citizen
Meanwhile in Sweden:
> According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
These are as far as I (and the law) are concerned the only two things that matter. If you've been convicted you are guilty, if not you are not. If you're guilty we can say you've committed a crime, if not not.
Actually looking at the source of that remark (highlighted intro to an article on thelocal.de), it's not supported by the rest of the article:
> The documents note that while the number of refugees in the country has risen sharply throughout 2015, the crime rate has not gone up correspondingly, but has "merely risen steadily".
Of course it would not rise sharply even if refugees do commit more crimes. Refugees are a small portion of the population and will only have a small effect on overall crime rates.
> Interior Minsiter Thomas de Maizière responded to the news by saying: "The current trend shows that refugees are just as unlikely to commit crimes as comparable groups among the current population. The majority of them don't commit crimes, they are seeking protection and and peace in Germany."
Note: "just as" and "comparable groups", rather than the whole population.
>
The rate of crime in refugee reception centres has gone up most quickly.
I would read that completely differently. The fact that 2.5x more immigrants are 'suspected' reads as a comment on racial profiling. Unless the author clarifies it's hard to read anything into the Sweden stat.
Generally, the most valid data from crime apparently comes from 'victimization surveys' - as opposed to actual police data, which is politicized.
So, from victimization surveys - people can only necessarily be 'suspected' of a crime i.e. 'were you robbed in the last year'? Well, if the person answered 'yes' - then the language may only imply that a specific individual was 'suspected' of a crime. Also, it's pretty difficult to determine ethnicity.
So this may not simply be a case of 'police suspects' vs 'police arrests' etc.. It's complicated. Better to have the references.
>> According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
What do you imply exactly? So Swedish police are more likely to suspect you if you are a foreigner, how unexpected.
It's worse than that. People from foreign backgrounds are probably committing far more crimes than this suggests - but because the police are so politically correct, they UNDERREPORT crimes by foreigners.
I don't need a link to a study to tell you what it means. The meaning is exactly the same as in normal speech, too bad for you since you'll have to do even more mental gymnastics to resolve your cognitive dissonance.
It means someone was suspected (e.g. were at any time a suspect during the investigation), regardless of whether they actually committed anything or not.
In Germany the percentage of foreign suspects about matches with the percentage of convictions, so statistically speaking the suspicions are correct.
I'd be surprised if it was different in Sweden, or any other country with similar problems, as it's easy to distinguish the looks of most immigrants and the local population.
> as it's easy to distinguish the looks of most immigrants
It's not. To take Germany as an example, the largest group of foreigners are Turks, followed by Poles and Italians. More than half of foreigner's in Germany are from European countries. On the other hand, many people from that groups are now German citizens and have grand-children that are in Germany in the third generation. A large number of German citizens have foreign born parents and many foreigners are born in Germany. If you can reliably distinguish between immigrants and the rest of the population by the looks your skills would be in high demand.
There's a difference between 'people from foreign backgrounds' and refugees. Even in Germany, I wouldn't be surprised if 'people from foreign backgrounds' commit crimes at a higher rate when you don't adjust for socio-economic conditions.
However the majority of Syrian refugees - about 70%[1][2][3] are women and children. Again, something that is rarely mentioned in certain parts of the internet.
acqq> the majority of all 2015 refugees aren't Syrian
> I was pretty sure they were actually (link to BBC)
Your link has 1.32 million asylum claims, around 360 thousand Syrians, then roughly one fourth are Syrians, three fourths aren't, that is, the majority of all aren't.
They do. According to official police statistics, 'people from foreign backgrounds' are responsible for about 30% of violent crimes, which makes them about three times as likely to commit such a crime, and they make up about 30-40% of the prison population.
Of the current population in Sweden, 60% are women and children and 60% are men and children. Children are 17,43%, so if you include them as both the group "women and children" and "men and children", you get a total of almost 120%.
70% is thus a very unclear number unless you can split out the number of children, or if one do not include how big the "men and children" group is.
If you incentivize people to say they're "children", and don't bother to verify claims of being a "child", you get a lot of "children", but that statistic won't mean much.
Claimed ages are accepted without question. To question the age is considered racist. There is an incentive to lie: minors get instant citizenship and lots of help.
So really, it isn't children. It's men.
Would you want a 30-year-old dude in your daughter's 7th grade class?
It's totally irrelevant that the crimes has decreased. The point is that a majority of all violence and sexual crimes is performed by immigrants (as confirmed by Sweden's most famous crime professor GW a couple of days ago).
Why are you so afraid to see that immigrants are over represented in this category of crimes?
Leif GW Persson, who the above commenter is talking about clarified this on TV just a couple of days ago. The segment starts 18 minutes in and is in Swedish: http://www.svtplay.se/video/12505960/veckans-brott/veckans-b... (hoping there is no region blocking...)
How is this relevant to the discussion? It's almost as if you seek to undermine his argument by pointing out that he has an addiction. Why would you do that? Are you scared of what he thinks and says?
> People from foreign backgrounds are suspected of crimes more often than people from a Swedish background [...] In a later study, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden.
So it seems that whilst immigrants are suspected of more crimes than average, they commit the same amount of crime as poor deprived members of indigenous populations.
I'd say THAT is irrelevant. If I become victim of a crime, it doesn't console me if the perpetrator is poor. I just don't want to become a victim of a crime.
The question was "is there a problem with immigration". How to mitigate crime is only the second step. And it will be difficult to mitigate it if you don't accept the causes.
Of course leftists believe that rich countries like Sweden are to be blamed for the poverty of people from other countries.
I am also not saying poor people shouldn't be helped. But there doesn't seem to be a universally working formula available. Just as there doesn't seem a formula for making strict Muslims tolerant of homosexuality and freedom of women.
If you are hanged by a radical Muslim because you are gay, it doesn't help you that he wouldn't have hanged you if only he had received the right educational interventions beforehand.
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Edit: sure, Christians can be dangerous radicals, too. If they were a significant part of refugees, that would be topical, too.
The problem seems, rather, that many refugees come from countries that skipped the enlightenment and are stuck in the middle ages in some things.
I don't have statistics on radical muslims, but there are whole countries where gays are being hanged. You can google the pictures yourself.
Ehrenmorde are cases were people are being murdered by family members (usually brothers murdering their sisters, but sometimes also men are the victims) for bringing "shame" to the family - like having extramarital sex, leaving the religion, stuff like that.
Some of the freedoms we take for granted are simply not taken for granted in other cultures. And I don't think there exists a formula for convincing people from such cultures of our values.
Got any numbers on how many Muslims are "radical" compared to Christians? Christians also perform exorcisms on gay children and in some cases lynch gay people.
Keep in mind that deporting radical christian swedes would also be a good move if retaining a cultural tolerance for gay people is a goal.
Cutting off immigration is not some kind of autosolution, but if immigrants commit higher levels of crime compared to the rest of the population, eliminating immigration would help.
Well, except some immigration adds to the number of people in poverty, so avoiding immigration that does that would address poverty and by extension crime.
This is reasonable, unless the theory is that when an immigrant arrives in Sweden, a person already in poverty gets 'promoted' and the immigrant takes their poverty space, thus keeping poverty levels constant.
One of the reason Sweden is welcoming migrants is because the birth rate is becoming really low, so there is need for new workers paying taxes.
They are accepting more poors (and by extension statistically more crime-prone) people today, to hopefully have a still sane and stable economy in the future (thus with less poors).
That may be their theory, but where is the validation of the theory? What are the reasons to assume it will work out that way?
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Edit: reason for assuming it won't: there are many countries with a huge population that are nevertheless poor. So number of people alone doesn't seem to help against poverty. Also, there still seem to be poor native Swedish people, so apparently Sweden does not have a working formula for lifting people out of poverty (except giving them government money, but that wouldn't scale in the way you propose - that wouldn't yield more taxes and riches in return).
Keep in mind that a lot of these first world countries have an aging population - so younger people being imported is good because it brings in more taxpayers versus pensioners. See this bloomberg article for some of the problems particularly immigrant-shy countries face: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/why-immig...
The article itself also addresses some of these points:
>Sweden has had one of the highest rates of growth in Europe over the last two years. Youth unemployment has declined considerably and is now at its lowest level for 13 years, and long-term unemployment (12 months or longer) is the lowest in the EU.
> One of the reason Sweden is welcoming migrants is because the birth rate is becoming really low, so there is need for new workers paying taxes.
People have a hard time believing that because the current migration does not bring in more but less working people - the migrants have a worse dependency ratio than native population, i.e. the proportion of migrants who have a job is lower than proportion of people already in country. Among OECD countries, migrants in Sweden have the largest difference in dependency ratio to native population.
I think it would make sense to reduce the number of poor people. If taking in immigrants is likely to increase the number of poor people, there is a problem.
The discussion is not about what should be done, only about Sweden's claim that there is no problem. If they say "yes there are criminals, but only because they are poor", they are dodging the issue.
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edit: Hacker News doesn't let me post more comments. So here is the comment I wrote, but I'll probably refrain from further ones:
"poor swedes could be deported and rich immigrants could take their place"
This is already happening in a way - it is called gentrification (not replacement with rich immigrants, but in general rich people will cluster together).
But Swedes formed a "state" and endowed some people with citizenship, but also giving them responsibility for their own people. So their responsibility should be to their own people first. Of course you can argue that forming such a state is immoral, but I think there are some practical arguments in favor of it.
As history has shown, states are very well capable of deporting significant fractions of their citizens, though. But presumably atm Swedes rate the ensurance to not be deported higher than the inconvenience of living with poor people.
The gender angle: yes, that is a popular argument in Germany, "but the refugees are only criminal because they are all men". But it should be possible to take that into account statistically. And even if the higher proportion of males would be the only issue, it still wouldn't change the fact that immigrants are causing problems. After all, they have a higher proportion of males.
>I think it would make sense to reduce the number of poor people.
This could be achieved in a number of ways. For example, poor swedes could be deported and rich immigrants could take their place - this would actually be more effective than halting immigration altogether.
Another form of issue dodging is when people suggest that immigrants are the issue without admitting that the situation is a complex combination of factors. One of the best predictors of criminality from a statistical viewpoint is gender. Of course, excluding all men from immigrating into our countries probably strikes most as inhumane :) To say the immigrant status of a person is to be specially focused on seems particularly convenient, but not humane.
edit: Its funny you're willing to accept taking gender into account statistically, but not the wealth of most immigrants.
What do you mean by "willing to take into account"? Male or poor, the problem is still that if immigration imports many male and/or poor, crime levels rise.
>But it should be possible to take that [being a man] into account statistically.
So why not take being an immigrant "into account statistically"?
It seems like the anti-PC folk have some things they think we should be PC about and take into account (like being a man) while being an immigrant is fair game. It doesn't make any sense to blame crime on one demographic factor, and ignore the others.
Its a matter of anti-PC folk selectively ignoring evidence that doesn't fit their worldview.
By "take into account" I meant it should be possible to statistically distinguish the factors of being male and being male+immigrant. So that it can be seen if being male is really the only factor driving increase of crime.
As for male criminal citizens, they should be sent to jail. In any case, as I mentioned before, they are already citizens, so the state has a special obligation towards them.
The point is also not to consider every immigrant a criminal just because some of them are, but to deal with life in one's country. If for example you could devise a test that would tell with 100% certainty if an immigrant will become a good, law-abiding citizen, a lot of immigration discussions would become a lot easier.
Btw suppose your suggestion would be followed, and male citizens would be deported because they are such a high risk for crime. Who would do the deporting? The world feminist army? Or should men just pack up and leave by themselves, admitting their own tendency to become criminals?
As the world feminist army sweeps the nation - the alt-right will form a guerilla force - middle-aged white men will rise up to fight - I can see it now.
It should be possible to statistically distinguish the factors of being poor and being poor+immigrant. Or education level+immigrant or degree choice+immigrant. Point is, focusing on immigrants demographically makes no sense when there are plenty of other demographic factors that are better indicators of criminality.
This is plainly wrong. Socioeconomic factors are not the major ones. Culture, habits and social conditioning in general are. People who do not share (or even comprehend) the shared values of other cultures have no respect to them and perceive others as "aliens". This works both ways. The cultural incompatibility and different social conditioning are the major factors.
Basically, well-educated people of any origin would behave more or less similarly, according to common shared values (or a subculture) while on the other side of the spectrum the differences could be huge and fundamental. One just have to call the things by its real names.
... is your opinion, contradicted by the available evidence. You finish with a suggestion to call things "by its real names", so I will: pushing a false narrative of cultural superiority is racism. Begone.
Cultures advance. Some are more refined and progressive than others. The practice of throwing homosexuals to their deaths is obviously not enlightened. Of course other cultures have their faults, too, but to argue that comparing cultures is racism is willfully ignorant.
"... is your opinion, contradicted by the available evidence"
This is false.
In fact - the evidence points much more strongly towards 'behaviour' than it does 'economic status'.
(By the way, I'm not making the case entirely that 'ethnicity is it' - rather, saying that there's tons of evidence to support it. I believe that it's rather more complicated).
'Economic status' is loosely correlated with crime in the USA for example. More crime is committed in poorer areas. Ok - so are they poor and therefore commit crime - or they have bad behaviours and are therefore poor?
The problem is - 'ethnicity' is considerably more correlated with crime, particularly violent crime.
For example, poor African Americans commit considerably more violent crime than their poor White or Asian peers.
Now - you could argue it's due to 'racism' etc. - and that's a good point, but it only goes so far.
Also - I'd argue that this is not about 'racism' - it's about 'ethnicity'. What is 'ethnicity' but a group of values, behaviours, norms, viewpoints, beliefs, patterns etc? Two groups with different ethnic backgrounds are likely to have very different outcomes overall in life. That's just reality - and it doesn't have to have anything to do with race.
I'm not actually making an argument one way or another - I think there's a lot to be said for how hard it is go grow up poor, or how hard it is to grow up facing racism and injustice - but at the same time - behaviours, mannerism, values etc. will define most of an individuals future - and those are passed down to children from their parents, and close community members, i.e. ethnicity. So it would be basically crazy to ignore this issue as well.
Well I'm not from Sweden so I cannot comment on that, but it's a well-known and documented fact that e.g. here in the Netherlands, ethnicities other than 'Dutch' are over-represented in about every negative statistic that is being tracked, amongst which are crime statistics. I could point you to cbs statline, which is the goverment statistics body, but it's in Dutch so I don't know if it's of any use to you, see [1] and particularly [2] for an overview table of crime statistics grouped by native, non-native, non-native+non-western, etc.
Whether these groups are over-represented because of socio-economic status, cultural factors, genetics or whatever seems largely irrelevant to me if you ask me, especially if you are reasoning about immigration in the context of public safety. None of these factors are controllable, and typically immigrants from distressed countries will both fall in the 'different culture' and 'low economic status' category at the same time. For public safety, the root cause why they are over-represented in 'bad lists' seems irrelevant to me.
Let's be clear that I don't mean to pass judgement on immigration policy, just pointing out that if you are creative with statistics you can prove or disprove almost anything to be related to everything, depending on your agenda. Correcting a statistic 'immigrants are over-represented in crime statistics' by saying 'but not compared to swedes with low economic status' seems like a pretty desperate attempt to paper over the fact that accepting large number of immigrants will not improve public safety, so to say.
> Whether these groups are
> over-represented because of
> socio-economic status,
> cultural factors, genetics
> or whatever seems largely
> irrelevant to me
Then I'm entirely unsure why you're contributing to a thread of conversation about evidence on that specific point, and providing evidence for something else entirely.
What are your sources that try to prove that socioeconomic factors are not 'the major ones', to the extent that that you can confidently state that it is 'plainly' wrong to attribute differences to poverty and lack of education?
It is obvious - poor but educated people are different from poor and uneducated. To lift people out of misery and poverty is what education is for in the first place.
In countries like India that could be clearly seen. Poverty alone does not account for the behavioral patterns. Education is the key. People knew this since antiquity, independently of a particular civilization - Indians knew this, Chinese knew this, you name it.
In many country, including France where issues similar to sweden exists, the quality of the education you receive is directly correlated with the median wealth of your neighborhood.
Poor suburbs have way worse education than rich ones.
Education is not only about academic knowledge per se. It is also a set of habits of self-control, acquired skills, social behavior patterns and transformed perceptions. This is what we call conditioning or exposure to certain culture.
Street kids, usually members of a gang, who never have experienced transforming influence of the culture of a good school and a good teacher are definitely not the same as those who vent through one.
> What are your sources that try to prove that socioeconomic factors are not 'the major ones'?
How about the Swedish government themselves?
- A 1996 BRA (Swedish Criminal statistics) study found that "there any indication that immigrants in Sweden are discriminated in the courts. Immigrant overrepresentation in registered crime is almost certainly real...nor is it caused by any generally lower social economic status (calculated as per SEI code) in Sweden."
- Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention determined that between 1985 and 1989 individuals born in Iraq, North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia),Africa (excluding Uganda and the North African countries), other Middle East (Jordan, Palestine, Syria), Iran and Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria) were convicted of rape at rates 20, 23, 17, 9, 10 and 18 greater than individuals born in Sweden respectively."
I asked the same question. In 2005 Bra released a report saying "Immigrants’ risk of being registered for crime has not changed in any pronounced way since the previous study conducted by the National Council, which related to the situation at the end of the 1980s".
Your claim was "What are your sources that try to prove that socioeconomic factors are not 'the major ones'?" so my question is 'what of rape'? This is the main crime making headlines. How does one explain it with socioeconomic factors? And even if you could, would that be a satisfactory explanation?
Is there a link to an actual government site instead of pictures of a book in Swedish that was published decades ago?
> Besides, socioeconomic factors to justify rape....really?
I'm sorry, but it is really difficult to have a serious conversation with someone unable to differentiate between the process of analyzing reasons for crimes and 'justifying' crimes. That is elementary stuff.
And your point doesn't even make sense. Are you saying rich, well educated muslims or african immigrants are still more likely to rape someone than a white person? Is your argument genetic? If that is not what you are implying - and I'll pay you the complement of assuming it's not, then you will have to at least consider socioeconomic factors.
> is there a link to an actual government site instead of pictures of a book in Swedish that was published decades ago?
That book was published by the goverment of Sweden. Does the host matter?
In 2005 BRA (Swedish Criminal statistics) published an update saying: "Immigrants’ risk of being registered for crime has not changed in any pronounced way since the previous study conducted by the National Council, which related to the situation at the end of the 1980s"
Link: https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...
> it is really difficult to have a serious conversation with someone unable to differentiate between the process of analyzing reasons for crimes and 'justifying' crimes.
Justification: "give grounds for, give reasons for, give a justification for". Pointing at socioeconomic factors is justifying the crimes by allusion to the circumstances of the crime.
Maybe you're confused it with 'condoning' which means something else.
So my point is, do we think we can analyze and find reason for aggravated rape within socioeconomic circumstances?
> Are you saying rich, well educated muslims or african immigrants are still more likely to rape someone than a white person?
2) > That book was published by the goverment of Sweden.
Probably, but pictures on "pdf-archive.com" are not a valid source since anyone can doctor them. It should be trivial and take a matter of minutes to find a link to the official government manual from a government site, if you're familiar with the study.
>So my point is, do we think we can analyze and find reason for aggravated rape within socioeconomic circumstances?
Possibly. We do not have any information that makes socioeconomic factors irrelevant, and comparable studies strongly tilt the balance in the favour of such an explanation.
Education is asymmetric. Educated could clearly see the world in the same naive way as uneducated, but the contrary is not true. This constitutes the fundamental difference and incompatibility which is supposed to be eliminated by providing the basic right for receiving an education.
First you state socioeconomic factors are not major factor, but then you go on saying "well-educated people of any origin would behave more or less similarly", but socioeconomic factors are: income, EDUCATION and occupation, ergo you're contradicting yourself or you have no clue what socioeconomic factors are.
Yes, you are right, I have messed it up a little. What I have tried to say is that there are major and minor factors, and the major ones, with highest weights, so to speak, are cultural instead of economical, and I will keep my stand.
A culture, which is a set of shared values, views and behavioral patterns, defines a person more than just his income. Occupation is important, (think of the castes of India) but the modern world a truck driver could be a physicist or a philosopher could make and sell sandwiches.
> So it seems that whilst immigrants are suspected of more crimes than average, they commit the same amount of crime as poor deprived members of indigenous populations.
"Commit the same level of crime as the subset of the population who commit the highest level of crime" does not sound very reassuring.
"In a later study, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden."
That means that the most important factor in terms of criminal activity is that immigrants are largely poor and poor commit more crimes. Not that rich immigrants perform as much crimes as the poorest of non-immigrants.
Or do you disagree with that assesment of what the study said?
The point is that most of these immigrants are poor, correspondingly prone to crime, and therefore not the sort of people you want to blast into your tiny population by the tens of thousands. Things are also confounded by the fact that most of these people are heavily theologically indoctrinated, making social integration and upward mobility effectively impossible, so they're going to stay poor.
> Things are also confounded by the fact that most of these people are heavily theologically indoctrinated, making social integration and upward mobility effectively impossible
This is when your biases are walking uninvited into a discussion about data.
Pew research does per-country religious belief surveys. I think you will find it very enlightening to look up the religious beliefs of the average Syrian.
And can you tell me what makes someone a refugee? Whether an average refugee is ideologically/culturally identical to the average non-refugee from that country? And how about a refugee who's choosing to go live in a country very different from their own?
Pointing us to "per-country religious belief surveys" is incredibly simplistic.
Which facts? What do you base this belief on? Any sources to any studies?
Swedens tiny population of 10 million can't handle immigration of tens of thousands? That's laughabale, it's been doing exactly that for decades now. Iraq, Iran, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Ukraine, Syria. Only recently has a resistance to these policies been seriously challenged...
Upwards mobility will happen, even during the worst conditions, like the slavery in US, did they manage to break free. This is not about when but how, true solidarity or true civil war and tragedy..
"the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden."
This is a classic red-herring.
'They were poor therefore they have bad behaviours'.
The failure of the logic is the assumption of correlation/causation.
One might argue that 'bad behaviour will lead one to being poor'.
I have no doubt that immigrants from Somalia will have a harder time than 'Sven Swede' growing up. At the same time, there are some truly terrible behaviours among specific immigrant groups.
This is the hardest part: the pro and anti immigrant camps are speaking past each other.
Important note: For some reason, ethnic minorities in Europe are considerably more marginalized then they are in the US - it's completely different.
Europe has a 'strong social safety net' - and 'social policy' of welfare etc. - BUT - they have very strong sense of ethnic identity, and very close social circles. A young Somalian may have very few Swedish friends.
In the US - people are far more gregarious and open personally. It's nothing to see a table of people of different ethnic backgrounds - but the social safety net is usually much weaker, no health insurance etc..
I live in Montreal, we have a good chunk of Muslims. They don't look too 'out of place'. You can't tell they are Muslim by looking. They could be Indian, Southern Italian, Greek.
But go to Belgium - the various Muslim communities are distinct, and ethnic identity is obvious. I've never seen a Burqa in Montreal, and Hijab not too often. In Belgium they are all over. Muslims live in 'broad areas' in Montreal, but in Belgium very specific communities.
It's a little bit of a mystery to me but I think it has everything to do with 'very traditional and conservative' social culture in Europe - even though paradoxically they are 'intellectually liberal'. Example: if you drink with a nice, well educated, open minded and kind Belgian - you may hear an 'African joke'. It's not considered as racist as it would be in America. Yet the Belgian will likely be more supportive of giving refuge and social services to the Africans than the average American. It's weird.
Sweden has a notorious degree of censorship in their press - they self-censor to control information in terms of what they 'deem is best for Sweden'. They will absolutely suppress information if it may cause some populist sentiment. It's just part of their culture.
The problem, of course, is that by suppressing real dialogue, then the loudest and craziest right-wing voices are the one's that get hard, and they cause a fuss, which is bad, and it may come to a breaking point.
I suggest that more transparency on the issues would be better for all involved.
This post had a lot of thought and effort put into it. I have no idea why it's downvoted. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the premise, it's put forward in an excellent manner and that's what we should strive for here: quality discussion.
It really isn't like that everywhere in North America. Chinatowns, for example. Heck, I lived in a little town of 3000 people and it had a "mexican" part of town.
I lost friends for dating outside my own percieved race. Folks seperate based on the color of their skin and background quite often. It isn't that folks don't break from the molds, but they are definitely there.
The little town didn't have many Muslims, so that wasn't as common, but it did have a fair amount of Mennonite communities in the area. Women with heads covered and conservative, long-sleeve dresses even during the hot summer months and men with beards. They generally kept to themselves, most likely due to cultural similarities. Some areas in the US have some section of Jewish coursts that handle some things and conservative Jews have a network within their communities (friend of mine, American, nearly went through an arranged marriage through them). These are probably much like many of the conservative Muslim communities you spotted - they are simply a different sort of conservative religion.
On the other hand, the majority of immigrant Muslims went to language class with are fairly progressive women. Lawyers and nurses and such. They stand out about as much as I do here in Norway.
> In the US - people are far more gregarious and open personally.
Can I just share my belief that this is polite fiction? It's certainly the view of America that we Americans have for ourselves, but can you honestly say you see evidence of it in day-to-day-life - and can you compare it to western Europe?
In my personal experience no, EU migrants are no more marginalized than they are here, and no, American migrants are no more "integrated". Vast swaths of SoCal and Texas is basically Mexico. Huge parts of Florida are basically Cuba. The Somali influx in Minnesota is real and highly separated from the rest of white society there. You don't need to look for ghettos to find large areas of extremely insular immigrants, often 2nd or 3rd generation still with no intention of or interest in immigrating in any sense other than physical location.
I'm not even commenting on if it's a good or bad thing, but ultimately I don't think we've EVER been the melting pot we claim to be, certainly the evidence around us doesn't suggest we are.
The melting was prior to about 1960, with the strongest melting during the World War I. During the wars, German-speaking communities switched fully to English. Everybody was expected to conform to a universal American culture, and most of them proudly did so.
Had the melting pot not grown cold, we'd have a lot less internal conflict today.
Taking about Belgium, I often suspect that they have an extra level of difficulty there due to the bifurcated national identity. What identity could newcomers assimilate into? You won't be particularly drawn to feeling Wallonian if you live in Brussels speaking French and even less to feeling Flandrian. I guess there isn't much Belgianness left if you are neither, so people are more or less predispositioned to stick to whatever parody of their original background they can still piece together.
I sense a similar difficulty in my native Germany, where so much of the current national identity is defined by feeling bad for something your grandparents maybe did (or by violently refusing to do so), that the absence of it in non-descendants of that generation is causing a noticeable "identity gap" even generations after immigration. This kind of stuff causes zero problems for those who have goals and education and achievement, but everybody else occasionally leans on group identity and will take whatever fits best.
P.S. I've actually come tho think that whatever ridiculous (from the German perspective, yes, totally ridiculous, if not outright scary) business Americans do with flags does serve a purpose after all. It gives both established and new Americans confidence that the new ones can belong, easing the process for everyone involved.
Agree on Belgian. Belgian is a 'nation' but the ethnic identity is Walloon or Flemish.
I live in Montreal and immigrants have the same problem: English or French? There is a 3rd category here (we use linguistic categories) - called 'Allophone' - meaning essentially neither English nor French, but 'multi' or 'something else'.
Despite the self-loathing of the past few generations - Germans are generally very German. A flag is a national symbol, not an ethnic one. Even the Nazis didn't use the flag of Germany - totally unnecessary!
'American' is not an ethnicity. All Americans have is the 'idea' of America. Which is represented by the flag.
In a way - 'nationalism' is more essential and necessary in a place like America.
Germany would be German with or without even the state of Germany.
America would disintegrate without national symbols.
In Canada - we are less nationalist because we are a British colony. Canadians had British passports up until very recently, just before I was born!
Mass migration is a new issue for Germany though - if it were just a few immigrants, it would be a non-issue. But the sheer scale of it makes it an existential issue, one that is akin to changing the Constitution - in fact - even stronger. A constitution can always be re-written. A nation can be rebuilt. But once a people decide that they are a 'nation' but not an ethnicity - and 'go multicultural' - there is no going back. I think that's a decision that should require a 'supermajority' vote type thing, not a decision made, de-facto in a 'crisis' policy by Merkel & Co. - obvious humanitarian issues notwithstanding.
> It's totally irrelevant that the crimes has decreased.
That depends. If you are looking for excuses for racism, it obviously is not relevant. But if you claim that the Swedish society has turned dangerous because of the immigrant crimes, it should be highly relevant for the discussion.
Why is the conclusion that immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women racist? I don't think there are many people who believe the cause of this statistic is genetic.
I thought women should be safe regardless the perpetrator but there is this weird dual standard where the whole company Uber (correctly!) gets the blame because of it's douchebag culture even when some of it's key executives don't directly partake in denigrating women, yet when migrants dominate negative statistics in far worse crimes against women all of a sudden imagined racism is the worst crime instead of actually abuse of women.
I think the problem with that particular violent subset of the Muslim subset of immigrants is exactly what you try to blame other people for: right-wing asshole mysogonist gay jew or "soft men" (i.e. respectful mostly left wing so yes you) hating retards. With absolutely no ground for respect let alone a chance of a better life in a modern society. And you should fight them with the same energy you fight "native" right wing hate groups.
People fleeing from that kind of violent and oppressive people should not go to Sweden only to be confronted by exactly the same people they were trying to get away of.
> Why is the conclusion that immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women racist? I don't think there are many people who believe the cause of this statistic is genetic.
First, if the very first sentence of wikipedia article of racism[1] tells that racism can be against a race or ethnic group, it should be accepted that the word "racism" is used not only to genetically different groups, but also against ethnic groups.
Second, your claim that immigrants dominate the statistics is wrong. They are over-represented. But even if we take that as your claim, no, the conclusion in itself is not racist. However, if you read what I wrote more carefully, that conclusion can be used as an excuse for racism.
> Why is the conclusion that immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women racist?
Because it appears to be a made up conclusion for the purpose of stoking anti-immigrant sentiment. You have yet to provide a source. OP has sources. GP has sources. You have fear mongering.
> The 2005 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention studying 4.4 million Swedes between the ages of 15 and 51 during the period 1997-2001 found that 58.9% of crime suspects were born to two Swedish parents (74.5% of total population), 10.4% of those born to one Swedish parent (9.3% of total population), 5.2% of those born to two foreign parents (3.2% of total population), and 25% of foreign-born individuals (13.1% of total population). The report found that male immigrants were four times more likely to be investigated for lethal violence and robbery than ethnic Swedes. In addition, male immigrants were three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault, and five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes
If you don't think WikiPedia is correct feel free to change the lemma, I bet they can use a certified statistician like you with all kinds of sources to prove them wrong. But until then:
Five times as much
And now I need to believe that I'm the one that needs to be corrected?
And another thing: once you split it up to region there's a bigger difference. East Asian and Western immigrants generally have lower or similar statistics compared to natives, meaning there are also groups that exceed the five times average.
> And now I need to believe that I'm the one that needs to be corrected?
Your original claim was:
> immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women
Let's see what "dominate" means [1]:
to be predominant in
And further, predominant [2]:
being most frequent or common
There is simply nothing to discuss here. Your original claim was wrong, even using your own statistics. (Of course, you may have tried to say or you meant that immigrants are over represented, which would be correct. But you did not say that. Thus you are the one to be corrected.)
It is irrelevant since they refuse to keep statics based on the Ethnicity.
Example (fictitious) if total Crime has decreased by 1% but crime by Swedish citizens has decreased by 5% it would actually show a 4% crime increase in non Swedish population. although this fictitious figure may seems small it would be nonetheless an unwarranted risk increase.
Not everything that distinguishes based on ethnicity is racism otherwise the vast majority of Medical research would be racist because they target specific populations for specific drugs.
> figure may seems small it would be nonetheless an unwarranted risk increase.
That is again another discussion where it may be relevant.
I took a quite specific discussion ("Sweden has turned dangerous because of crimes by immigrants") and in that discussion the fact(?) that total crime numbers have not increased is very relevant.
> I took a quite specific discussion ("Sweden has turned dangerous because of crimes by immigrants") and in that discussion the fact(?) that total crime numbers have not increased is very relevant.
Not necessarily the case because demographics are never homogeneously distributed across territory. If the rape/crime numbers didn't fall uniformly across the whole population, then you could have scenarios where crime fell by 20% in some regions and increased 25% in others, and overall it would be constant. I'm making up the numbers to illustrate.
More data would make your point much more convincing.
Lots of factors contribute to change in criminal activity, urbanization, rise of income inequality but also more people in segregated areas will probably not work out very well either.
A more relevant question is whether immigrants are making Sweden more dangerous than it would otherwise be.
It's possible that Sweden became safer because Swedes commit fewer crimes, and this decrease outweighed a crime increase caused by immigrants. Crime-by-nationality data would help resolve this question. Why is the Swedish government hiding it?
Every criminologist, relevant government institution or agency already knows that immigrants are over-represented in crime. I'm not sure what would be learned and what strategies would change if one were to learn exactly how that over-representation looks today.
Generally, an analysis for how to solve a problem starts with finding out and admitting the facts. The steadfast refusal in this case is actually worsening the situation because it is creating distrust in government.
>The point is that a majority of all violence and sexual crimes is performed by immigrants
Source please? Because the available data, at least for Germany, does not support this claim at all.
Latest BKA report from first quarter of 2016 puts the amount of "offenses against sexual self-determination" for migrants at 1.10%. [1]
As somebody who's lived over 10 years right next to Bavaria's biggest initial reception center, in Zirndorf, I'm always amazed by all those claims as to how insanely criminal these people supposedly are. I've never witnessed anything like that, Zirndorf is actually quite peaceful town with barely anything ever happening.
Not attempting to prove the grandparent right (because they are not), but the 1.1% figure is misleading. It's the portion of migrant crimes that are sex crimes, not the portion of sex crimes committed by migrants of the all sex crimes.
"The point is that a majority of all violence and sexual crimes is performed by immigrants"
I definitely read that as "the portion of sex crimes committed by migrants of the all sex crimes".
The problem is that "immigrants" is an extremely imprecise category. I don't know enough about Sweden, but I know that in Germany, foreign crime is primarily dominated by organized crime from abroad: pickpocket gangs from North Africa, burglary gangs from Serbia and Georgia, the Russian Mafia, Lebanese crime clans, etc.
In contrast, Syrian refugees seem to be among the most law-abiding foreigners you can find (followed by Iraqi refugees, as I recall).
"Immigrants" is a fairly useless category for criminological purposes, as it combines several other categories with vastly different profiles, some with outsized crime rates, some below that of natives.
Leif GW Persson is famous for writing books and being on tv shows - not for being a crime professor (and he is no longer a professor of criminology). There's a reason googling his name comes up with breitbart first, and goodreads second.
What difference does that make? As we've seen in USA, a job that has always been filled by career politicians or soldiers has been filled by a man famous for being on tv.
On the other hand this guy was in a relevant position. Is being a former professor of criminology different to currently being a professor?
He says that "if you look across the board on all convicted crimes it's half-half between natives and immigrants. But if you look at the more 'sensitive' crimes there is a significant over representation of immigrants"
If the total number has remained steady, but the majority of perpetrators are now immigrants, then that implies the total number committed by native Swedes has dropped by roughly half in just a few years. This is highly implausible, so somebody's claims here are wrong.
Remarks like this is exactly why this whole debate has derailed. No one is even contesting that immigrants commit more crimes IT'S EVEN IN THIS ARTICLE WHICH IS AN ARTICLE FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
Or you could hear the (former) US ambassador to Sweden claim the increase of 1.5 million violent crimes in Sweden is not attributable to refugees (around 3:58) - "...does not mean that is somehow related to migrants."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFPjEM0Izpc
It's all semantics. Immigrants commit more crimes. Adjust for economic/social factors and most of that disappears. So in one war they do and in others they don't. Statistics is hard and both sides use it to prove their point.
My point was simply that there is not agreement across the board that they commit more crimes.
Yes, people are unscrupulous when it comes to statistics, that's definitely true. But "adjusting" for things is usually a way for people to get the result they want with the numbers. The government does this all the time with "seasonal adjustments" to housing and employment data. There never appears to be any rhyme or reason to the adjustments other than getting a better/desired number. Also, when people argue that it's because of socioeconomic factors or whatever else they may claim, that doesn't change the fact that they either do or do not commit more crimes. The reason for it can be discussed and addressed but many people try to use such an explanation as a way to weaken the fact that is presented.
I think the general citizen needs to become far more knowledgeable about math and statistics since they are always used to justify public policy nowadays. The common person is terrible at being able to weed out the bullshit that is presented by sources which all have agendas.
> But "adjusting" for things is usually a way for people to get the result they want with the numbers. The government does this all the time with "seasonal adjustments" to housing and employment data. There never appears to be any rhyme or reason to the adjustments other than getting a better/desired number.
While "adjusting" may be used for misleading purposes, government seasonal adjustments generally used a disclosed-in-advamce methodology with a clear purpose; they only seem to have no rhyme or reason if you don't bother to do even the most basic checking.
An overview of seasonal adjustment at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is available at [0], and more detailed information about the specific methodology and factors used in particular series are readily available.
I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do. Without a hard set of rules to follow, it's useless. Also, looking into the X-13 ARIMA software documentation, it looks similar to other statistical software packages like Eviews, which I have used in the past. This methodology they follow still highly subjective based on the parameters used in the model.
This is very much like what my employer does for publishing public documents for financial compliance. We are required to publish a public methodology/rulebook for our products so that investors can, in theory, replicate everything we are doing on our side. In practice, though, forget it. No one can replicate it. The document serves to explain the concepts behind the product and the general guidelines, but no one can fully know the granular details that make all the difference.
It sounds like the same thing is going on here. No one can realistically be expected to take the same gigantic set of data, individually set a dozen or more parameters and run it through software and get the same result. And that's not even counting data sets that the "clean" by discarding certain outliers before running the model.
> I disagree. That link shows no formulas whatsoever, just a generalized explanation of what they do.
I said the link was a general overview of seasonal adjustment used in data series by the BLS, and that they provide additional detail the about the specific methodology used in specific series elsewhere.
But the key part from that summary relevant to your comment upthread is that not only are the specific methodologies for particular series published in advance, but the resulting adjustment factors for future time periods are determined and published in advance, before the data to be adjusted exists.
One may disagree with the methodology or the figures, but neither is the methodology opaque nor are the factors chosen to get desired results (since the actual raw data, and thus the factors necessary to get produce desired results, are not available.)
If you didn't adjust, and immigrants somehow still were convicted of fewer crimes then that would be truly astonishing since then the poor/unemployed immigrants would be committing vastly fewer crimes than the corresponding group among non-immigrants.
Doing these kinds of adjustments is not dishonest if done correctly and in these circumstances it's often absolutely necessary to produce useful stats.
How stats are to be massaged depends on what argument one tries to make though.
There are valid arguments from uncontrolled data too.
An example could be e.g "the immigrants we allow in are going to be unemployed and poor which means we are going to get more crime, I don't want that so I'm against immigration" - this is an entirely valid argument to make from uncontrolled data.
This is a two step argument: immigrants are poor and poor people more criminal.
This is not the same as saying "immigrants commit more crimes" because if unqualified such a statement always assumes controlling for relevant factors.
I agree that controlling for certain factors is a core principal in statistics so that you can tease out relationships once you quantify the impact of other factors.
Also, "if done correctly" is a huge assumption with everyone having an agenda in the current climate.
But what I was trying to get at is not that the argument should just be with that one uncontrolled data point. My issue is that society can't even agree on that basic, top level data point to arrive at the first-stage fact of whether immigrants do/don't commit more violent crime. Everyone would have to agree on that first, then they can dig into the "all else being equal" scenarios where you control for the other factors that influence crime.
"The point is that a majority of all violence and sexual crimes is performed by immigrants "
This makes you a "right wing thug" for many people in Europe. Europe is lost. They lost their immunity for enemies of their open society. Uneducated immigrants from violent tribal societies will first make the social system implode, then the society.
Most of the crimes in Sweden is done by immigrants. Sweden is the rape capital of Europe. It's creepy to see this kind of behaviour condoned and labeled as nothing.
The original chart used in the report you reference comes with cautions in interpreting Sweden's position, which do not seem to have been heeded by the authors of the report.
You are deliberately lying and citing well-known unreliable sources. Why are you doing this? Are you trying to push some pre-concieved agenda? I genuinely don't understand.
The source itself says that it is is unreliable :)
"Please note that when using the figures, any cross-national comparisons should be conducted with caution because of the differences that exist between the legal definitions of offences in countries, or the different methods of offence counting and recording."
There, you're doing it again! You are purposefully seeking to distort the truth, and I don't really understand why you are doing so. Nobody is seeking to 'downplay rape' – an obvious dog-whistle accusation – and instead I reckon people generally want to understand if there is a problem, and if there is, then why there is a problem.
The problems with what you are doing are:
1. You are citing a right-wing think tank. I know that all sources have bias, but this is not even pretending to be an objective one. It's a poor source for data.
2. That think tank bases it's analysis on UN data which explicitly points out that it is not suitable for direct international comparison.
I do not personally know if an increase in immigration in Sweden's resulted in more sexual violence, but I am absolutely certain that we will not figure that out using the sort of facile "why do you love rapists so much" shit that you are spewing.
Sweden's definition of rape and the way they count them is much more inclusive than other countries, so it is not valid to compare statistics across countries. See http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39056786
> if a person comes to the police and reports being raped by a partner or husband every day for the past year, the police will record each of these events.
In many other countries these incidents would be recorded just once: one victim, one type of crime and one record.
Doesn't the claim about refugees in Germany use the same trick the Swedish Government uses? There are fewer refugees than native Germans, so even if the absolute number of crimes conducted by Germans would be higher than the absolute number of crimes by refugees, it doesn't say anything about the prevalence of crime in the populations.
For example, if you have 100 "native" Germans and 10 refugees, and there were 3 German criminals and 1 refugee criminal, 10% of refugees would be criminals, but only 3% of Germans, even though more Germans than refugees would be criminals.
You're presumably reading the graph of the % of population polled every year who say "they've been exposed to sex offences"(not necessarily in that specific year), not the actual yearly crime rates, which are lower down and which state:
"In 2015, a total of 18,100 sex offences were reported; this is an 11 per cent decrease as compared with 2014. The number of rapes reported to police decreased by 12 per cent to 5,920 between 2014 and 2015. Reported offences regarding sexual molestation and sexual coercion, exploitation etc. also decreased to 8,840 (-8 %) and 1,430 (-6 %) respectively. "
> According to the official statistics on The Swedish Crime Survey, the sexual violence rate in Sweden remained about the same between 2005 and 2014
Why picking the period 2005 to 2014? Immigration started 1960s and increased a lot 2014-2016. It would make a lot more sense to look at the sexual violence rate 1960-2016. Do you dare?
I don't know. Maybe HN should refrain from this subject.
Never trust any statistics that you didn't... - Believe this or go with the anecdotal real-world experience from a cop, linked below, Peter Springare, see e.g. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/764574/Political-Sweden-.... Never read about it in 'good' newspaper before. So who knows? The politic is under much pressure to tell the 'right' things now.
I just wish they would just tell the delicate numbers, e.g. ethnical, religious, economic, <whatever> background of inmates, terror, crime. And allow to talk about it freely. We now are a data driven society, why not here? Why afraid?
Why not give (collect) the full data? (I browsed around a bit, but I think I would need more detailed raw data to say something)
It seems that the main point of contention is whether migrants are more or less likely to commit crimes (in Sweden). This article doesn't answer this question at all for us. The following is the one remotely relevant statistic:
>> People from foreign backgrounds are suspected of crimes more often than people from a Swedish background. According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
And even this isn't really what we're looking for because accusations != convictions. One can easily postulate that foreigners would have higher chances of being falsely accused, and factors like this have to be accounted for in the analysis.
The only factual evidence that we have to go on so far is otalp's reference to a study that showed German refugees are less likely to commit crimes than the average citizen.
Sadly, in this kind of argument, facts rarely matter and will likely not change erroneous views.
To me it seems the obvious problem is that the socio-economic dynamical system called Sweden doesn't know how to integrate foreigners. The core problem has nothing to do with the migrant crisis or Muslim cultures. The solution definitely requires a serious examination of the current migrant crisis and Muslim cultures.
I would personally recommend you follow https://twitter.com/ArgBlatteTalar. He breaks down all the hypocrisy regarding this particular topic in his videos on YouTube. Sources for his video material can be found in the description box.
Most of the tweets I see from this account are either rabble-rousing ("And that's because migrants are nothing but voter cattle for the Left"; "Share this video and help me reveal the immense hipocrisy of our "feminist" Swedish government.") or complaints about media in general (from the Trump style media conspiracy angle to thoughts on how Youtube is banning him because he didn't get as many watches as a Tucker Carson video.)
If you share the same world view as the Swedish Democrats, you'll probably agree with this person's viewpoint. If you don't, you probably won't.
Nobody is interested in generalized studies about immigration or 25 year statistical trends. They want to know what's happened in the last two years or so since the refugee crisis started. So much of what is put forward here just doesn't apply, and blatantly so, that I assume motivated reasoning.
Hey biased hacker news people who love to down vote comments they disagree with even if they make valid points, here's a second one for you to double down on. And don't give me that "don't comment on being down voted" crap. That's just a way to make discussion for how calling out ideologically motivated rating off limits.
The thing is - normal immigration and refugee immigration are two different things.
The refugee problem cannot be solved by "not accepting refugees". That's not a viable solution.
What should be done differently? Building huge internment camps? Would the human suffering really be smaller in those camps than it has been in society as a whole now through crime etc? I doubt it.
Those who argue that the wave of refugees caused so much problems rarely present any solutions.
Non-refugee immigration on the other hand (of which Sweden had had lots) thats a different matter. But somehow that's not the focus of this recent debate.
Even using hand picked numbers to try and alleviate people's fears, they have to admit that the main assumptions about immigrant crime are correct and that many areas are in fact turning into "shitholes", for lack of a better term.
You're likely being downvoted for posting a jokey comment more than anything else. From what I've observed on HN, if you're concerned about downvotes, it's likely better to err on the side of straightforward rather than clever.
The level of government level censorship in Sweden is concerning. Maybe worries over negative reaction in the native population are used to justify hiding crime statistics, but I think it will lead to a violent backlash eventually.
It's shocking to me that "grenade attacks" have virtually become an every day occurrence.
Refugee centers have already been burned down in several instances, and anti-migrant sentiment is growing.
I really don't see how the large scale immigration going on in a Europe is going to result in a positive result, at least in short term over the next few generations.
I think it's incredibly irresponsible to encourage migration without being able provide productive meaningful lives to the migrants. People are not pets.
Thread: Both left and right are talking a lot of nonsense about the situation in #Malmo. I was there four weeks ago, reporting on the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ahmed Obaid, an Iraqi-Swede immigrant with a bright future ahead of him. Here’s some actual info for anyone not interested in the shrieking leftist eye covering or racist right wing exaggeration that is surrounding #Malmo atm.
Ahmed (police, family & gang members all agree he was innocent & not affiliated with gangs) was one of three murders in Malmo in Jan 2017. In that month, there were 13 shootings, a small IED explosion and a hand grenade thrown into the lobby of a police station. Statistically this was a sharp increase in violence.
People pretending there's no problem with gang violence in #Malmo need to get real. The problems in #Malmo stem from many things. One big issue is how the Swedish government seems to have pushed its large migrant population in #Malmo into a corner and tried to forget about them.
This, coupled with the lack of employment and easy access to weapons across from Denmark and from the Balkans, has of course created a problem. The unemployment rate for foreign-born men between 16 and 64 in #Malmo is 30%. That compares with 8% nationally. (despite what the Trump lot with their half mast Pepe hard-ons and Wotsit fingers might claim).
A lack of skilled work, discrimination, housing issues, failed assimilation and ridiculously lenient laws toward violence (sorry lefties) all plays a role in the very real problems Malmo is facing. There’s also a huge lack of support for the police in #Malmo from the Swedish government. They don’t have enough officers, are under resourced & with Sweden's laws their power to lock up criminals they do catch, is diminished.
Police in #Malmo seized ~600 weapons in 2016. Some semi-auto rifles & hand grenades. From ’16 there’re also 13 currently unsolved murders. Whilst reporting in #Malmo, I spoke to the family of Ahmed Obaid, a gangster parading around the streets in a bullet proof vest and with a policeman about all of this. They all agreed, that yes, there IS a big problem in #Malmo and it is being largely ignored.
Unfortunately it’s now blown up (excuse the pun) in a way that isn’t currently shedding light on anything of substance. You have the right wing pretending there are no go zones (there’s aren’t, that’s bullshit), non-stop rape and daily explosions, and you have the left who’re pretending it’s all milk, honey and racist propaganda. Ignoring the situation in #Malmo doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and exaggerating why doesn’t make it so.
TL;DR - #Malmo has a problem with gang related violence, but this cannot be blamed entirely on immigrants, it also cannot be ignored.
Those refugees are mostly good people. They escaped war. That must count as a glorious success?
Whether Sweden is better off or slightly worse off (yes we have more crime, more public expenses, etc) is secondary. Obviously there is a limit to what Swedes will accept - but even debating this issue without acknowledging the positive side of it (people being safe) is completely mental.
Translation: I'm so fucking tired. What I will write here below, is not politically correct. But I don't care. What I'm going to promote you all taxpayers is prohibited to peddle for us state employees. That tends to drive in a non-career and non-individual pay. Even though it's true. I don't care about all of this, will soon still retire after 47 years in this activity. I will now and every week to explain in detail what for employing me as investigators / investigator on coarse mcu police in örebro. It's not going to be good with the opinion or other leftist kriminologers perception in the general debate.
Our pensioners is on its knees, the school's a mess, healthcare is an inferno, the police have totalhavererat etc etc. We all know why but no one dare or wants to peddle the reason, due to the fact that Sweden always lived on the myth of prudes ultimate society who have osinnliga resources to be at the forefront when it comes to be the only politically correct option in a dysfunctional world that beats Knot on their own by destructive behavior in different name of.
Here we go; this I've handled Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, off of, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, Rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again Christopher... what is it true. Yes a Swedish name snuck on the outskirts of a drug crime, Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.
Countries representing the weekly all crimes: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. Half of the suspects, we can't be sure because they don't have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that they're lying about your nationality and identity.
Now we're talking just örebro municipality. And these crimes occupies our utredningsförmåga to 100 %.
So it looks here and has been like for the past 10-15 years.
Return next Friday with a statement for the past week 🇸🇪
The two statements:
1. "Immigration doesn't lead to increase in crime rate".
2. "Most criminal offences are committed by immigrants".
dont't contradict each other. It may well be that immigrants push locals out of criminal business, because they are now the most poor and discriminated. That means that if you somehow decrease immigration rate, the business will be taken by Swedes again.
No, but the logic in the same. People closer to the bottom of social hierarchy are more prone to sexual assaults. Immigrants just occupied social niche that was previosly occupied by poorest locals.
The government of Sweden, which has been censoring news articles about Islamic rape and failing to punish Islamic rapists, says these are facts, so don't worry? Give me a break.
It's not that simple. There's a lot happening on this front, and when the government controls a substantial part of the economy, they have effective censorship powers even when they're not actually burning books.
National economist Tino Sanandaji has been writing about how BRÅ (Brottsförebyggande rådet) has ceased to make statistics about immigration-rateld crime, for political reasons.
He published a book about this subject [1], and it's quite a success, but libraries are refusing to buy it because it is "inciting hatred". ("Mein Kampf" and very many extreme-left books are still available from the same libraries, they are not "inciting hatred".)
Tino Sanandaji and people like Hanif Bali are, however, able to write about the subject without much fear or prosecution, because they have a Middle-East immigrant background themselves.
Librarians are socialists and liberals to nearly 100% no surprise there. They also have a lot of autonomy in deciding what books to buy.
And the fact that people from the Middle East would have more room to maneuver in discussions about racism without being accused of racism is hardly surprising.
Surely not all librarians are socialists, but e.g. this one appears to be of the more fact-resistant kind, and comes up with repeatedly different and increasingly funny explanations for why the library shouldn't get a bestseller book. The latest one is "it's not fact-checked", as if the other books in the library (like the mentioned Mein Kampf) were.
Swedish source confirms Swedish political narrative, very trust worthy. /s
Let's go and convince all the victims of crimes in recent years that they're just imaginging things and they're safer then ever. And hand out more "don't grope me" bracelets for extra protection[1].
[edit] Classic HN, don't forget to upvote the guy who says physically assaulting people with different opinions is OK.[2] Sounds tolerant and progressive.
Ban my account, but the comments can stay for exposing your collective hypocrisy for the future. Goodbye.
Well honestly I don't even care what happens in Sweden, because they're responsible for themselves. Their case will be an example for the whole EU soon enough.
I do know that I won't support the same policy in my country though, because just avoiding the risk of such crimes is with a measure like this is worth enough.
Can we not do this in HN? I've watched many communities I used to enjoy get ruined by flamewars over Islamophobia and immigration, and I'd rather not see that happen here.
This discussion about whose statistics are more correct, seems to me to resemble those who argue that certain races have statistically higher IQ or statistically higher net worth or are statistically more inclined to be involved in crime.
OK, so you have statistics that show that you are right. What you going to do with them? Start discriminating against every single individual of that particular ethnic group?
The United States, a country with roughly 16,000 murders a year and 90,000 rapes [1], where a violent crime occurs roughly occurs every 26.3 seconds and a rape every 4.2 minutes [2] is focused on the volume of crime in Sweden.
This is a level of delusion and farce that is without precedent. We've entered a true Twilight Zone where people have completely disconnected from reality and are now truly just fantasizing about symbols that have no connection to reality. The whole "Sweden debate" really shows what direction this country is going in and it's just remarkable.
465 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39056786
Why don't you tell us how you really feel?
BUT -- they are emphatically worse than useless for getting high-level acquainted with an unfamiliar subject, which seems to be what's at stake here.
("It's bad to be locked into a party-line bubble" (correct) "so it's good advice to add RT and Breitbart to your daily media diet" (wrong))
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/honest-about-lying/
RT published an article about the Ukrainian army shooting down that Malaysian passenger plane. I am not sure if it still exists, but I have read it on their web site. Then they quickly started changing their story in followup articles, but never actually published the truth about it (unless they published it since I stopped reading them, but I seriously doubt it).
The RT mentality seems to be "the truth doesn't matter, perception is everything". It is hard to find even a hint of journalistic integrity in their work. This is far beyond being "biased". Yeah, pretty much everyone is biased, but not in the despicable way RT is.
Malaysian plane is a very good example of this - they were floating a lot of mad theories absolving Moscow of any guilt but in the end they were still reported just as "versions". It's very hard to catch a media company on outright lies because of such evasive tactics.
The New Gazette (Gorbachev's paper) is internal Russian media and did not run a full retard propaganda campaign on this issue. They printed "Forgive us, Netherlands" on their cover page. This is the paper that has had something like 5 journalists assassinated in the last decade for actually doing their job.
By presenting RT as somehow not particularly bad you are lowering the bar all the way to the ground and disrespecting thousands of honest journalists who work hard to inform the public about the wrongdoing of those in power. None of those people work for RT. RT is a pure propaganda paper. Journalists in my country have taken down people in our government and even sent them to prison by relentless digging for the truth. They have been killed in their pursuit of justice. Throwing actual journalists into the same basket with RT indicates an extremely warped perspective.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gadda...
> But it is a jump from that to suggesting Gaddafi is supplying troops with it to encourage mass rape.
> US ambassador Susan Rice has also said, without offering evidence, that Iran was helping Syria to suppress dissent
That's some serious mental gymnastics just to argue the old "everyone is the same" line when RT is literally a 100% propaganda paper of the Russian government.
The Guardian specifically was one of the main drivers of both Manning and Snowden leaks. They have earned the right to be called a serious paper.
I have seen bending of the truth happening in all major media outlets ever since I started following them, and I honestly don't want to get drawn into the measuring contest of "which newspaper lies the worst" right now. Especially since due to the absence of good metrics we'd have to do what, find and nitpick articles over the last N years? And then we'll have to argue if there are or there are not traces of "journalistic integrity"? Nah, screw that.
Even in the worst example you could cherry-pick for the Guardian, the journalist just reported on something a US official said and explicitly distanced themselves from the more ridiculous claims. This makes them as bad as RT? Ridiculous. The Guardian constantly heavily criticizes their own government, the US government, etc. They are clearly not tools of the people in power.
RT on the other hand just does whatever is in the interest of the Russian government. The only reason it even exists is to try to push narratives favorable for the Russian government to a western audience. They're just a tool.
It requires some serious personal bias in order to see the two papers as the same.
Snowden/Putin is irrelevant as Snowden leaking that stuff was favorable for Putin. At the same time, the Guardian publishing it was not favorable for their government.
The five journalist you mentioned are on this list https://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/ with over 50 russian journalist killed, and not a single one is from RT, I wonder why...
It's nothing more than propaganda and disinformation with an agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFQdBHQjPHs
This one is back from the time of the siege of Aleppo last year. Frontline reporting is probably even more biased than anything else. Journalist speaking against the soldiers he's embedded with? What will happen next time he's embedded with any troops?
http://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2C0...
Google "site:rt.com russia massacres" and have fun finding something perpetrated by Russia's military there, even playing it down as an accident.
Individuals, professionalism and reputation is what makes news outlets credible, and real competition between news agencies is the very key for that to work, so without a free press environment, news are unreliable.
https://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/
See any RT journalists on that list?
Wake up dude
the level [of lethal violence] in 2015 – when a total of 112 cases of lethal violence were reported – was higher than for many years.
lethal violence using firearms has increased within the context of criminal conflicts. The number of confirmed or suspected shootings was 20 per cent higher in 2014 than in 2006. The statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33.
The number of reported rapes in Sweden has risen.
some 13 per cent of the population were the victim of an offence against them personally in 2015. This is an increase on preceding years, although it is roughly the same level as in 2005.
In a report published in February 2016, the Swedish Police Authority identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity.
This part atleast, as explained to me, is because rape has a much wider statistical definition. All sexual assault supposedly is classified under it, penetration not required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden#Legislation
And if the statistics are done like in France, they aren't even allowed to note which religion the suspect has, so some simple statistics that would give such a relation are by definition not possible to make.
On one side, it's true, the free society is not supposed to look in the people's heads. On another side, if the perpetrators explicitly tell you why they do what they do, it's really, really wrong discarding that information.
The policies that disallow the access to the non-biased facts are serious limitation in more than one land. As an example in the US, there's this 2001 "Guideline" for the "professional journalists":
http://www.spj.org/divguidelines.asp
> he statistics also show that 17 people were killed with firearms in 2011, while the corresponding figure in 2015 was 33.
This is the part that's ironic - if the US had the same per-capita lethal violence rate as Sweeden except for immigrants who we'll assume murder 100 times as often, it would still be a lot safer than the US is currently!
Claim: "In Sweden there are a number of 'no-go zones' where criminality and gangs have taken over and where the emergency services do not dare to go."
Facts: No. In a report published in February 2016, the Swedish Police Authority identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity. These places have been incorrectly labelled 'no-go zones'. What is true, however, is that in several of these areas the police have experienced difficulties fulfilling their duties; but it is not the case that the police do not go to them or that Swedish law does not apply there
And I don't know if it is the same in Sweden, but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods. So again, nothing to worry about.
I mean, who cares if there are 30 gernade attacks in Malmo [0] as long as overall deaths in Stockholm habe gone down by more than 30?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_S...
does anyone else find it strange how they keep jumping around in (what feels like arbitrary) years?
Yes it's true: there are pockets where Ambulances are stoned by local kids and need police escorts. That's not a vicious rumor. It's a tiny area (few blocks) of the country though. I'm sure many countries have terrible areas.
How our areas somehow turned on ambulance and firefighters is a complete mystery to me though.
I wouldn't be surprised if every country has areas people claim are like that.
England: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647355/Firefighters... Scotland: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bonfire-nigh... Wales: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/youths-attacked... USA: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/12/01/at... Ireland: http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-sickening-mo...
Those links are only to illustrate what people claim happen. They're not necessarily representative of what things are actually like. Talking to people who live in these places is just about the only way to get a good idea.
The youths are never charged from what I can tell, the police just disperse them. I assume this means the incidents don't go in to crime statistics.
That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps; that may be over-cynical.
> That's one way of "bringing down violent crime", don't arrest the perps
It is overly cynical.
The UK has two sets of crime statistics: police recorded crime and the annual crime survey.
Even the police recorded crime stats (which aren't regarded as statistically reliable) don't only rely on arrests, but include all reported crimes. So police arresting or not wouldn't affect the numbers.
But the annual crime survey (which is statistically reliable) doesn't rely on police recording.
Who reports that people do that? Tabloid newspapers? They've been lying about that for decades.
After the 1989 Hillsbourogh disaster (where people died due to health & safety issues, and negligence from the police), tabloid newspaper The Sun wrote a full page headline accusing Liverpool fans of attacking police who were trying to save people. It was a complete fabrication.
"Those people" attacking our police/first responders is a common lie that sells tabloid newspapers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#The_Sun
E.g. Svenska Dagbladet (no fringe publication, a major newspaper): https://www.svd.se/ambulanspersonal-far-skyddsvastar
Of course, this is not unique. Plenty of American cities have the same: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/madi...
I live in Finland, where our criminal code actually has a separate crime called "infringement of freedom to political activity", for threat of violence or endangering well-being of others who express their opinion, participate a demonstration or set up an association for peaceful political activity. So attacking someone at a political rally is a worse crime than a random violent attack.
Of course it depends on the opinion, but I see nothing wrong with it in principle.
Lies are rampant. Especially racist anti-immigrant lies:
http://hoaxmap.org/
Sure you could blame Muslims for those no-go areas. But you need to demonstrate it. And demonstrate absent other factors like socioeconomic status, unemployment rate etc.
Who said there is nothing to worry?
> but you are not really politically allowed to say what kind of people live in those neighborhoods.
First, source for not allowed to say. Second, what do you want to say?
I've stayed on that friend's house for the whole of January, daily living there and haven't heard about a single crime happening. Asked my friend's flatmates just now and they laughed about it.
Same thing for a friend that lives inside what some maps label as "no-go zone" in Kista, nothing happened there at all for the past year.
So seriously, the alarmism here is very extrapolated compared to the actual risk. Compare to Belgium as you want but be a bit more honest about your utter ignorance instead of just a "And I don't know about Sweden"-trumpesque discourse.
Luckily there seems to be less attacks in the last half a year.
I think there's been more attacks, but here's a summary of some of them: http://yle.fi/uutiset/3-8517586 (Dec 2015, in finnish)
Look, I'm fully aware you need to panic, and I'm fully aware this need is being satisfied by a bunch of cronies standing to make heaps of money on your panic. Just know your fear is not justified and should not be the reason for aiding the raise of fascism in europe.
What I know is that these grenades came from the Balkans after the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, now why is it so common for it to happen in Sweden of all countries I honestly don't know.
One theory is that due to a quirk in the way the law is worded, grenades where not considered weapons, but rather a controlled explosive[0]. What this means in practice is that the punishment for smuggling hand grenades into the country is much much lower than the punishment for smuggling in guns. As the law is written, if you are first time offender caught with a hand grenade you're likely to get away with a fine.
[0] https://www.svd.se/fritt-fram-ta-in-handgranater-i-sverige
Semi-related: A significant amount of illegal firearms in Europe (including the firearms used in recent attacks) were sold legally in Slovakia as "deactivated acoustic expansion weapons" and then "reactivated".
It's kinda ridiculous when I see a map where they mark "Enskede" as a no-go zone.
The google results were mostly commentary, the only useful report I could get out of them was this one:
http://ciwnews.com/2017/02/16/2-africans-sentenced-for-assau...
"Aftonbladet" provided much more results, I stopped after the first two pages, which seemed to encompass Jan-Feb 2017:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/A1e8r/smash-and-grab-mot...
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/kgErL/inbrott-i-telebuti...
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/bP5Jk/pistolman-trangde-...
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/GRowx/god-morgon-det-har...
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/x2non/oppnade-for-hemtja...
(most of these are from january and february 2017).
Same thing in August last year in Husby (a suburb in northern Stockholm), 47 cars torched. Same suburb that saw the same violent riots and more than 100 cars torched in May 2013.
Was there a single riot like that in Sweden that does not involve immigrants? Were there any honor killings that don't involve immigrants from specific part of the world?
Simmilar pattern can be observed in France too.
Wonder what America would be like today if they'd cleared out all Italian and Irish immigrants 100 years ago because of immigrant ghettos?
And you don't think that certainly more than half a billion africans would deserve to live a much better live than what is possible where they live now? Solution imho only can be to 'fix' those countries and 'fix' the birthrates.
Globalization also means that certain customs no longer are tolerable...
There are certainly places in Dublin where you might be more likely to get yourself robbed in, but beaten up for drinking alcohol or walking as a white person with a Muslim girl? Nowhere.
And where are you suggesting such a place does exist? In Sweden? If you have any links to reports of incidents like you're describing I'd love to see them.
And I can anecdotally state that I've witnessed attacks first hand in Muslim areas in both Belgium and France due to ideological reasons (e.g. a girl in my party was assaulted because she touched a man's arm and apparently shouldn't have). I've lived in the worst parts of Dublin and yeah, problems can arise, but they're non-ideological ones. Which means that you can avoid them by using general street smarts.
They're not migrants, refugees or any kind of ethnic minority though. Just poor and bored.
The same is true about rape. In Sweden, the definition of rape and sexual abuse is incredibly broad. I know a person who got accused of sexual abuse by his wife because she said he had slipped up a finger in her vagina while asleep without her consent. Once. Several years ago. Can you imagine any other country where a case like this would ever be looked at even remotely seriously? Moreover, incidents involving sexual abuse are reported a lot more often, because everyone is a lot more informed about what consent means and what their rights are. It is highly unusual in the global context. So rape in Sweden is nothing like rape pretty much anywhere else in the world.
I could talk a lot more about these issues, but these two points are the most important to keep in mind when discussing crime in Sweden relative to crime everywhere else in the world.
As far as gun violence goes, the US almost turned into a no-go country as far as myself is concerned.
It would help because those things are mostly done by the youth born there. Most migrants in a small (2sq miles although some like to extrapolate it to the whole country) community like Molenbeek (where most of those problems originate) are second generation or more. We are way past the point where it's a migration problem or where a migration stop would help.
I don't know how closing our borders or my absolute favourite "sending them back to their country of origin" (which will result in an infinite loop) will really help.
But then again for some we are not allowed to point to socio-economic problems, they pretend that it simply doesn't exist or it's the complete fault of the other side. What I often see in Belgium is the argument that Mohammed should find a job or that most are lazy.
But from the moment we the see the name on his resume or he shows up to do our garage door installation, it's a big "no-go" also. It's a vicious circle that works both ways.
Taking about the vicious circle, I heard of a company that basically discards any resume with a male Arabic name in it, because they had lots of problems with that group in the past, but not for the women. Too bad for the Mohammed who wants to do a good job of course.
Very hard problem, but it all starts with being totally honest about the situation.
Most are forced to correlate crime and migration because they can't write online that the real thing bothering Westerners is the virulent growth of an anachronistic religion that makes both men and women subservient to an old book or wizard in the sky. Somehow we'll find a few fellows here defending the increasing percentage of women completely dressed as ninjas as something natural in modern societies. Neglecting the violence that happens to them when they don't dress that way.
HN, it's time to be honest. That's the real elephant in the room.
It's not the police who are labelling (or, more importantly, treating) these zones as "no go", that label has been applied by other parties, such as tabloid press.
Quite happy to see official sources at least trying to put the foot down regarding all this weirdness (I am Swedish).
They're not exactly no-go, more like "no-go without bulletproof vest, riot gear and a big set of cojones"
And that's nothing to do with immigrants just us Scots and our unfortunate propensity for violence (see: radge).
But instead people like to blame immigrants because it's easier. It's always that faceless person over there who is responsible for your problems.
But for quite many decades, there didn't use to be areas like that in Sweden.
The fact that this leads to massive segregation and thus integration problems is the downside we haven't figured out.
The Guadaloupe raccoon had been a common pet up to then -- and police began raiding neighborhoods with large teams to take people's pet raccoons into custody. These raids were often quite tense and dangerous.
I mention this to provide a case which demonstrates 'no go zones' that do not involve immigration. Its my guess that immigration is almost never the cause of a no-go-zone neighborhood -- I think such neighborhoods are almost always the result of real systemic social biases that cause socio-economic problems.
>and anti-racist groups that demolish your car, house, get you fired from job for liking wrong thing on Facebook.
Yea. It's your prerogative to hold controversial opinions. But you certainly don't have any right to be publicly racist and expect no retaliation.
To clarify, I meant legal retaliation using legal means like firing the racist person from their job. Burning down their car is of course, illegal.
First result from 4sec googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MYMVfyHi0
>But you certainly don't have any right to be publicly racist and expect no retaliation.
Seriously, demolishing someone's car/house is not worth mentioning in your comment, but have no right to be publicly racist? I also didn't say it was racist, where did you take this from?
Also, what's your address because I disagree and would like to put an axe on your front door.
Not sure about Sweden, but in my country being publicly racist[1] would be viewed as a crime[2]. I don't think anyone expects employers to continue employing active criminals.
>I also didn't say it was racist, where did you take this from?
>anti-racist groups ... get you fired from job for liking wrong thing on Facebook
Presumably, anti-racist group would take offense to people liking racist things on Facebook (otherwise, why describe them as anti-racist as opposed to anti-'whatever it is you like on Facebook that they have issues with')?
1 - defined as: "Who founds, supports or propagates a movement that provably aims to suppress freedoms and rights of man, or preaches racial, ethnic, national, religious or class hatred, or hatred against another group of people, will be punished by 1 to 5 years of prison."
2 - in reality you'd probably be sued for it only if you pissed off someone with the money/time to spend on the legal procedures
If your country is typical of the sort of Western nation with that kind of law, then "1 to 5 years of prison" is more than you'd get for rape. That's quite some fear of words.
Here in the USA, we mostly laugh at the actual hate groups. Your country has made them a forbidden fruit, all the more enticing. You also can't know people's true feelings... you might discover them abruptly someday, in a very bad way.
"That person said something I disagree with" doesn't imply that you have the right to demolish their property and their job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24PCOMi3QAQ&feature=youtu.be...
Straight from the horse's mouth (cops in this case). tl;dw they wear bulletproof vests and helmes in Malmö (BP vests are really rare on nordic police officers compared to the US)
https://www.nrk.no/urix/svensk-politi_-_-vi-er-i-ferd-med-a-...
That link includes video interviews with Stockholm police (not Malmö), with one police officer claiming they experience Police Fishing ("polis-fishing"), fake calls designed to bring the police to a specific location, where they are ambushed by locals who attack them by throwing stones at them ("steinkasting").
The report also mentions "no go-zones", but I can't find any mention of that specific phrase in the Swedish Police PDF that NRK link to and use as their reference.
There's a whole bunch of people who think Muslims are secretly taking over western nations, and being aided by Jews. As part of that they believe they are literally setting up whole cities under Islamic law.
This is why Obama not being born in Kenya can seem like political trivia to one person, but evidence of a wide ranging conspiracy to another.
"Sharia" and "Muslim brotherhood" are a couple of other terms that have resonances you're probably not aware of amongst the "counter-jihadi" movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia_patrols
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra45nX9JmW4
There are parts of Sharia that are not compatible with Western liberal values.
And this conspiracy goes right to the top. The current president of the USA accused the previous president of the USA live on national television of helping to organise a terrorist shooting in a Florida nightclub. Hilarious right? What a wacky character. Not so funny when you realise large numbers of people literally believe this to be the case.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can you make commit atrocities" -- Voltaire.
Can we have a discussion of Sharia that is both critical and allowed? Can I be critical of it and not be a conspiracy theorist and not be a Trump supporter?
P.S. Where can I find the full list of topics not to be discussed?
Everyone else though, will be aware that words can have unexpected connotations, like the use of the word "thugs" or "religious freedom" or "globalist bankers" in modern american politics, and can adjust accordingly.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/nogozones.asp
Yeah Dearborn, the HQ of Ford Motor Company. I've been to Dearborn, it sure is not a no-go zone or anything to be scared of. Beyond ridiculous.
Seriously, we need to get a sense of perspective.
Edit: see also, perspective from Latvia in this thread.
The difference here is that Sweden is creating new no-go zones. However that happens (in this case immigration) it is really bad. If a government policy would create new no-go zones, then that government policy is bad. Stop it!
Fixing the older no-go zones is a different problem. It is important, but a lower priority than not creating new no-go zones.
It's like... close the plug in the bottom of your boat before worrying about the water that is already there.
Especially when you consider that "53 residential areas" are way beyond what the Swedish government and law enforcement can control and contain. In a properly ran country, this would pose some kind of state emergency, but they keep ignoring it.
In the case of Islamic terrorism, I've heard it commented that recruits come from the children of migrants rather than the migrants themselves. This certainly seemed to borne out by the London 7/7 bombers and the Charlie Hebdo attackers to name two cases.
Prison populations in western countries also seem to have disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities.
I also heard that Canada refuses to break down crime figures by ethnicity/race as a matter of public policy. If that is true it seems that there is a fear that the figures might look bad for minorities.
In the interests of community harmony, authorities commonly seem to want to accentuate the positive and sweep any negativity under the rug.
But it is also a little racist to try to hide the problem, as if criminality is inherent to the ethnicity and cannot be solved, so may as well be ignored.
Finnish people were considered Asian in some American states in the early 20th century. Should they be included in crime statistics with Chinese?
Also, if police are required to collect this data, who else is? Should you be able to look up the registered ethnicity of a person similar to how anyone can look up tax returns in Sweden (and other Nordic countries)? If not, why not?
Ignore the data supporting one side of the debate, and of course the other side will seem more convincing.
Trump at the moment has a very low approval rating - maybe not everyone got what they read into him?
Polls also predicted him to have less than a 10% chance of winning the election. Not all data is good data.
If you rolled a ten sided dice once and it came up with a ten, would you feel repeated tests that showed there was a 10% chance of that outcome should be ignored in future?
The predictions were essentially right. Hillary Clinton had a better chance of winning the election, but Trump successfully rolled the dice with his 10% odds: he campaigned in some critical states that were expected to go blue and won them over by a narrow majority.
Polling was incapable of accurately determining what the odds really were. If that die was six-side, but I told you there was a consistent 10% chance of rolling a 1, then I'm providing you with a bad probability. The media and pollsters did the same (for whatever reason).
Nope.
If polling couldn't determine what the odds really were, the probabilities, which showed it was well within the realm of possibility that trump would win, aren't evidence the polls were out of alignment with reality.
Semantics at this point. I'll rephrase your comment with consistent terms:
If polling couldn't determine what the odds really were, the odds, which showed it was well within the realm of possibility that trump would win, aren't evidence the polls were out of alignment with reality.
The possibility of Trump winning does not exonerate the accuracy of the odds presented by polls. The odds were not correct, and the polling data was flawed.
If there are 10% odds of something happening and it happens after one event, that's absolutely not a reason to say the data points that generated the odds are flawed.
That is the reason you presented.
I'll clarify, to help.
The reason not to trust polling data presented today is that the probabilities presented in the past were not accurate.
Also worth noting that accurate national polls wouldn't have captured a Trump victory (since Clinton lead in the popular vote). You would need state polls, but they're not always accurate. Trump's win in Michigan was a big surprise, but so was Sanders' win in Michigan a few months earlier.
Your backswing is just the same old bigots getting a momentary upper hand because of the way the chips happened to fall in the last election. Whether they can leverage that into more lasting power remains to be seen.
Like the Trump administration, and the Hungarian government... No, wait, they do the exact opposite. I guess all authorities are not the same after all? And it's not just black and white either. Governments around the world consist of people with incredibly different backgrounds and political agendas. There is no single "authorities".
It is a common refrain these days that governments are trying to hide the facts to advance some kind of shadowy globalist agenda. It's good to be critical, but you need to be equally critical of sources that claim to be telling you the real truth.
Your comment contains three claims, and they're all either "I heard" or "seem to have". We should try to do better.
"Police in Ontario were forbidden to compile race-based crime statistics." https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/08/17/a-thorny-history...
"Charlie Hebdo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/-sp-charlie-he...
"The men responsible for the carnage [7/7 attacks] all grew up in Britain" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/77-bombings-l...
"According to the Young review, the disproportionate representation of young black and Muslim prisoners in the UK is now greater than that in the US." https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/24/rise-proport...
If you want to see the government trying to hide things, just look at Sylvester in Cologne and how long it took officials and the german TV channels to report/acknowledge what happened. If this information hadn't spread on Facebook, who knows if we would have ever known.
I am Austrian and until the migration crisis I've never felt misinformed. (BTW: Austria took more refugees per capita in than Germany) But this crisis changed that. It seemed the public media didn't just report, they wanted to persuade people to the right course. This is also about subtle things and therefore hard to prove: According to statistic refugees were about 70% male, but who was almost exclusively on the frontpage? Only women and children.
I can handle dubious or stupid Twitter/Facebook comments and chit-cat about what refugees supposedly did. The shocking thing was that public media was so one-sided. It is no coincidence that the name "lying press" got popular at this time. IMHO this was a general feeling that people had. That they didn't get the full story.
So do you think the problem is likely to be greater in 20 years time?
As they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
What's your opinion?
My feeling is that things will get worse. But by then we will have climate change starting to hit, and an unsustainable population. I guess I am pretty skeptical about the future overall.
Also the Swedish national council for crime prevention expected this rise over the last few years because in 2013(before there was a serious influx of migrants) Sweden broadened the definition of rape. A similar increase in crime was seen around 2006 because of 'legislative changes' about how things were recorded.
In the US research on the link between immigration and crime largely find no link between the two[2], and of the relative minority of studies that find a link, there are twice as many studies that find that increased migration reduces crime as the reverse.
In Germany, refugees are less likely to commit a crime than the average citizen[3]. From the publicly available information it is impossible to conclude with certainty that taking in refugees increases crime, especially considering that the vast majority of 'crimes' they do commit are non-violent things like not travelling with a ticket.[3]
What is rarely mentioned is the increasing crimes committed against refugees in refugee camps. In germany, there were 1,029 attacks against refugee residences in 2015, following 199 in 2014. Attacks on refugees increase the crime rate themselves.
[1]-https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...
[2]-(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#United_S...).
[3]-https://www.thelocal.de/20151113/police-refugees-commit-less...
There's also one particular thing that doesn't pass the smell test for me from your German article:
"Less than 1 percent of the total crimes committed by refugees are sex crimes, going against rumours spread on social media that these have become more common with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees."
1% doesn't strike me as a very low percentage of sex crimes, but I googled around for some statistics, and found another article from the same source - https://www.thelocal.de/20160218/refugees-to-germany-commit-...
Here, the title is that "refugees commit less crime than Germans". However, the stats they quote show otherwise - despite refugees being anywhere from 0.8 to 2%, they committed at least 4% of the sex crimes in the country - a factor of at least 2. The article itself says that the sexual assaults reported during the New Year's Eve were not part of this number, so this is a conservative estimate. The article quotes a ratio of 2:1 men over women as a mitigating factor, however, doing the math most favorably towards refugees(100% of sexual assaults committed by men, 40/60 split in men/women in Germany) leaves you with an adjusted rate of ~2.6% of crimes, still significantly higher than their proportionate population.
From that article though I was able to acquire this statistic for 2015:
"The total number of this type of crime committed nationwide throughout 2015 was almost 47,000"
From here - https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=170... - I found that the total criminal offenses in germany were close to ~6mil. From this you can calculate the rate of sexual assault for the german population - 47k / 6mil ~ 0.8%. It's not as significantly different from the previous number, but still doesn't support the claim that, at 1%, refugees commit less sexual crimes than the german population.
EDIT: There is also a mitigating factor I just thought of that the newspaper didn't mention; refugees are likely to have a poor economic status in Germany, and are thus more likely to commit crimes for that factor alone. I don't know how to calculate for that as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That seems to mean something different than "less than 1 percent of total sex crimes are committed by refugees".
It does not in any way state the what chunk out of the total sex crimes were committed by refugees, indeed.
So, "less than 1%" of the "very low six figure" number of total crimes committed by refugees are sex crimes. Ok then, so let's conservatively say it's 100,000 * 0.009 = 900 sex crimes (not sure about what time range that even covers? 1 year? First 9 months in 2015 since the report was compiled in Oct 2016).
There have been 7022 sex crimes (reported) in 2015[1], total.
Using that, the conservative estimate for sex crimes committed by refugees of the total sex crimes committed is: 900 / 7022 = 12.8%
Let's assume (and grossly overestimate really) there were about 1.5 million refugees total in (the end of) 2015 and a total population of 81 million.
So 1.8% of the population was refugees, yet that cohort committed 12% of sex crimes.
But 900 / 1.5M refugees is a at most 0.06% of refugees (not even considering multiple offenders) who commit sex crimes, compared to the total population rate of 7022 / 81M = 0.009%
Downplaying the issue is not helpful. On the other hand, it's not helpful either but actually dangerous to rubberstamp all refugees as sex offenders when only at most 0.06% of them committed a sex crime in 2015.
As pointed out already, there are many mitigating factors to put this into context.
[1] http://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Broschueren/2...
Here's the BKA report on "Crime in the context of migrant influx 1st Quarter of 2016": https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/Themen/Siche...
That report also puts the number of "sexual assaults", out of all the crimes committed by migrants, at 1.10%.
In fact, the report just reaffirmed what I've already heard elsewhere - the vast majority of crimes come not from "Syrian refugees", but migrants from countries without a crisis that would lead to them seeking asylum. This has been a very common criticism of the "floodgate" approach to accepting all immigrants regardless of their ability to justify their refugee status.
The report is the only thing that actually matters in this context because it's the actual data. All your sources are just news-outlets trying to interpret data from sources they don't even share with the reader.
>but migrants from countries without a crisis that would lead to them seeking asylum
And half these countries are not even "Muslim countries", yet they are overrepresented in the crime rates, while people from countries like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are proportionally lower with their crime rates. Which goes straight against the common misconception of "It's their Islamic culture that makes them so criminal and incompatible to our culture!".
> This has been a very common criticism of the "floodgate" approach to accepting all immigrants regardless of their ability to justify their refugee status.
You first have to accept them to check if they actually qualify for refugee status, those that don't qualify don't get the status and thus have to leave the country.
How else would you want to handle this? Leave them all outside the border so they create their own communities, without any infrastructure or law enforcement? Do you seriously think creating these kinds of "slums" would be beneficial to anybody?
Then what? THEN they go back to the border and they create their own communities? How can you __actually__ make that many people leave?
>Do you seriously think creating these kinds of "slums" would be beneficial to anybody?
No, but the fact is these refugees are not able to contribute to the societies they come to in a meaningful way. For instance, in Germany only 1 in 10,000 refugees that arrived last year are employed. Is accepting a large quantity of people, most of whom do not have the kind of formal education required to be successful in a highly developed economy, beneficial to anybody? What's the end-game for this?
I never claimed the system is perfect because there is no perfect system for such complex problems.
>No, but the fact is these refugees are not able to contribute to the societies they come to in a meaningful way. For instance, in Germany only 1 in 10,000 refugees that arrived last year are employed.
That's because they are legally not allowed to work until their status has been cleared. It's not a matter of them "not wanting to work", it's a matter of not having the right status to work.
The other alternative, one that many populist right-wingers are advocating for, is forcing them to work even when their refugee status is still not cleared up.
But that would actually wreck havoc on labor wages because then you'd suddenly have created a whole new class of people that would work far below average wages just to "justify" their stay in the country. Do I really need to spell out what that would mean for the average low-income worker in the country? Average wages would be pushed even lower than they already are, which has already been a growing problem in Germany for over a decade.
There are no easy solutions to any of this, people who claim there are easy solutions are simply deluding themselves about the long-term ramifications of their solutions.
And no: Just "not letting them in" also ain't no solution, these people won't simply "disappear" just because you hide them behind big fences and walls.
No matter how you frame it, "globalizations" and freedom of movement has it's advantages and brings a lot of positive changes. As somebody who crossed the "Iron curtain" several times, when it still existed, I hardly wish those times back. It would be a step back for Europe and humanity as a whole. Fences and walls don't solve problems, they only compartmentalize them.
Agreed. But my real problem here is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of plan. There are many questions that need to be answered, among these:
1. Should a country accept refugees? If yes, how many?
2. Are these refugees permanent residents? If not, what is the timeline of their departure?
3. How do we integrate thousands of people with very diverse backgrounds into our system?
>That's because they are legally not allowed to work until their status has been cleared.
Finding concrete numbers on this issue is surprisingly difficult. I have found from a few different sources that only 13% of in-status refugees have found work. Again, there are real challenges in integrating refugees, and there is no clear plan for how this is to be accomplished.
>these people won't simply "disappear" just because you hide them behind big fences and walls.
Agreed, and something should be done to help them. But I think that the default shouldn't be to let them in. That's foolhardy, especially when governments don't have clear policy answering the questions that I have asked.
In the absence of a clear plan regarding the status of refugees, I can't help but feel that it is irresponsible to accept all. It will require real, concentrated efforts by a government to make a refugee system work in the interests of both refugees and citizens, although I agree that it is an effort worth making.
I respect your experiences with free movement. We agree that we don't desire for "iron curtains" to be re-established. Coming up with an approach to these problems that works is beyond my skill set -- I only hope to see that those who come up with possible systems are able to clearly articulate their details, strengths and weaknesses, and allow the people to make a choice from a selection of systems.
EDIT: I am also going to add that I am aware that some of these questions have definite legal answers, but given that there is so much turbulence and desire to modify existing legal systems that predate the current refugees-crisis, there is a lack of certainty and dialog regarding policy designed to face today's issues.
Meanwhile in Sweden:
> According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
http://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migrat...
Two completely different things.
We don't know who actually committed a crime. That should probably be either "arrested for" or "convicted of".
"Suspected of" probably means "arrested for", but there too, the author has chosen a word that's unclear.
commit: Convicted of
suspected of: Not convicted
These are as far as I (and the law) are concerned the only two things that matter. If you've been convicted you are guilty, if not you are not. If you're guilty we can say you've committed a crime, if not not.
> The documents note that while the number of refugees in the country has risen sharply throughout 2015, the crime rate has not gone up correspondingly, but has "merely risen steadily".
Of course it would not rise sharply even if refugees do commit more crimes. Refugees are a small portion of the population and will only have a small effect on overall crime rates.
> Interior Minsiter Thomas de Maizière responded to the news by saying: "The current trend shows that refugees are just as unlikely to commit crimes as comparable groups among the current population. The majority of them don't commit crimes, they are seeking protection and and peace in Germany."
Note: "just as" and "comparable groups", rather than the whole population.
> The rate of crime in refugee reception centres has gone up most quickly.
It sounds like thelocal.de took some liberties.
Generally, the most valid data from crime apparently comes from 'victimization surveys' - as opposed to actual police data, which is politicized.
So, from victimization surveys - people can only necessarily be 'suspected' of a crime i.e. 'were you robbed in the last year'? Well, if the person answered 'yes' - then the language may only imply that a specific individual was 'suspected' of a crime. Also, it's pretty difficult to determine ethnicity.
So this may not simply be a case of 'police suspects' vs 'police arrests' etc.. It's complicated. Better to have the references.
What do you imply exactly? So Swedish police are more likely to suspect you if you are a foreigner, how unexpected.
I wish the authors had included a link to that study so we could see what "suspected of" means exactly.
It means someone was suspected (e.g. were at any time a suspect during the investigation), regardless of whether they actually committed anything or not.
Ok then.
I'd be surprised if it was different in Sweden, or any other country with similar problems, as it's easy to distinguish the looks of most immigrants and the local population.
It's not. To take Germany as an example, the largest group of foreigners are Turks, followed by Poles and Italians. More than half of foreigner's in Germany are from European countries. On the other hand, many people from that groups are now German citizens and have grand-children that are in Germany in the third generation. A large number of German citizens have foreign born parents and many foreigners are born in Germany. If you can reliably distinguish between immigrants and the rest of the population by the looks your skills would be in high demand.
See https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Populat... for detailed statistics.
However the majority of Syrian refugees - about 70%[1][2][3] are women and children. Again, something that is rarely mentioned in certain parts of the internet.
[1]- http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
[2]-https://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php
[3]-http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/...
However the majority of all 2015 refugees aren't Syrian?
Edit: I misread this chart... a lot. Syrians are the largest group but not the majority. Never mind!
> I was pretty sure they were actually (link to BBC)
Your link has 1.32 million asylum claims, around 360 thousand Syrians, then roughly one fourth are Syrians, three fourths aren't, that is, the majority of all aren't.
70% is thus a very unclear number unless you can split out the number of children, or if one do not include how big the "men and children" group is.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-real-news-tm-from...
If you incentivize people to say they're "children", and don't bother to verify claims of being a "child", you get a lot of "children", but that statistic won't mean much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeAnarchy/comments/47ri8u/this_...
Claimed ages are accepted without question. To question the age is considered racist. There is an incentive to lie: minors get instant citizenship and lots of help.
So really, it isn't children. It's men.
Would you want a 30-year-old dude in your daughter's 7th grade class?
Why are you so afraid to see that immigrants are over represented in this category of crimes?
> People from foreign backgrounds are suspected of crimes more often than people from a Swedish background [...] In a later study, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden.
So it seems that whilst immigrants are suspected of more crimes than average, they commit the same amount of crime as poor deprived members of indigenous populations.
* Stop immigration.
OR
* Integrate poor people into society, the workforce, etc.
Immigration of more poor people from a different culture makes the already difficult task of integrating poor people even more difficult.
Of course leftists believe that rich countries like Sweden are to be blamed for the poverty of people from other countries.
I am also not saying poor people shouldn't be helped. But there doesn't seem to be a universally working formula available. Just as there doesn't seem a formula for making strict Muslims tolerant of homosexuality and freedom of women.
If you are hanged by a radical Muslim because you are gay, it doesn't help you that he wouldn't have hanged you if only he had received the right educational interventions beforehand.
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Edit: sure, Christians can be dangerous radicals, too. If they were a significant part of refugees, that would be topical, too. The problem seems, rather, that many refugees come from countries that skipped the enlightenment and are stuck in the middle ages in some things. I don't have statistics on radical muslims, but there are whole countries where gays are being hanged. You can google the pictures yourself.
Here is a list of "Ehrenmorde" in Germany: http://www.ehrenmord.de/doku/2016/doku_2016.php
Ehrenmorde are cases were people are being murdered by family members (usually brothers murdering their sisters, but sometimes also men are the victims) for bringing "shame" to the family - like having extramarital sex, leaving the religion, stuff like that.
Some of the freedoms we take for granted are simply not taken for granted in other cultures. And I don't think there exists a formula for convincing people from such cultures of our values.
Keep in mind that deporting radical christian swedes would also be a good move if retaining a cultural tolerance for gay people is a goal.
This is reasonable, unless the theory is that when an immigrant arrives in Sweden, a person already in poverty gets 'promoted' and the immigrant takes their poverty space, thus keeping poverty levels constant.
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Edit: reason for assuming it won't: there are many countries with a huge population that are nevertheless poor. So number of people alone doesn't seem to help against poverty. Also, there still seem to be poor native Swedish people, so apparently Sweden does not have a working formula for lifting people out of poverty (except giving them government money, but that wouldn't scale in the way you propose - that wouldn't yield more taxes and riches in return).
Keep in mind that a lot of these first world countries have an aging population - so younger people being imported is good because it brings in more taxpayers versus pensioners. See this bloomberg article for some of the problems particularly immigrant-shy countries face: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/why-immig...
The article itself also addresses some of these points:
>Sweden has had one of the highest rates of growth in Europe over the last two years. Youth unemployment has declined considerably and is now at its lowest level for 13 years, and long-term unemployment (12 months or longer) is the lowest in the EU.
Compare this with Japan: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-ails-japans-economy...
I think I see a bias here: culture is valuable, unless it is western. In the future, it will not be possible to go visit Swedish culture.
People have a hard time believing that because the current migration does not bring in more but less working people - the migrants have a worse dependency ratio than native population, i.e. the proportion of migrants who have a job is lower than proportion of people already in country. Among OECD countries, migrants in Sweden have the largest difference in dependency ratio to native population.
Thougt many argue both in favor and against further immigration for various reasons.
The discussion is not about what should be done, only about Sweden's claim that there is no problem. If they say "yes there are criminals, but only because they are poor", they are dodging the issue.
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edit: Hacker News doesn't let me post more comments. So here is the comment I wrote, but I'll probably refrain from further ones:
"poor swedes could be deported and rich immigrants could take their place"
This is already happening in a way - it is called gentrification (not replacement with rich immigrants, but in general rich people will cluster together).
But Swedes formed a "state" and endowed some people with citizenship, but also giving them responsibility for their own people. So their responsibility should be to their own people first. Of course you can argue that forming such a state is immoral, but I think there are some practical arguments in favor of it.
As history has shown, states are very well capable of deporting significant fractions of their citizens, though. But presumably atm Swedes rate the ensurance to not be deported higher than the inconvenience of living with poor people.
The gender angle: yes, that is a popular argument in Germany, "but the refugees are only criminal because they are all men". But it should be possible to take that into account statistically. And even if the higher proportion of males would be the only issue, it still wouldn't change the fact that immigrants are causing problems. After all, they have a higher proportion of males.
This could be achieved in a number of ways. For example, poor swedes could be deported and rich immigrants could take their place - this would actually be more effective than halting immigration altogether.
Another form of issue dodging is when people suggest that immigrants are the issue without admitting that the situation is a complex combination of factors. One of the best predictors of criminality from a statistical viewpoint is gender. Of course, excluding all men from immigrating into our countries probably strikes most as inhumane :) To say the immigrant status of a person is to be specially focused on seems particularly convenient, but not humane.
edit: Its funny you're willing to accept taking gender into account statistically, but not the wealth of most immigrants.
So why not take being an immigrant "into account statistically"?
It seems like the anti-PC folk have some things they think we should be PC about and take into account (like being a man) while being an immigrant is fair game. It doesn't make any sense to blame crime on one demographic factor, and ignore the others.
Its a matter of anti-PC folk selectively ignoring evidence that doesn't fit their worldview.
As for male criminal citizens, they should be sent to jail. In any case, as I mentioned before, they are already citizens, so the state has a special obligation towards them.
The point is also not to consider every immigrant a criminal just because some of them are, but to deal with life in one's country. If for example you could devise a test that would tell with 100% certainty if an immigrant will become a good, law-abiding citizen, a lot of immigration discussions would become a lot easier.
Btw suppose your suggestion would be followed, and male citizens would be deported because they are such a high risk for crime. Who would do the deporting? The world feminist army? Or should men just pack up and leave by themselves, admitting their own tendency to become criminals?
It should be possible to statistically distinguish the factors of being poor and being poor+immigrant. Or education level+immigrant or degree choice+immigrant. Point is, focusing on immigrants demographically makes no sense when there are plenty of other demographic factors that are better indicators of criminality.
Basically, well-educated people of any origin would behave more or less similarly, according to common shared values (or a subculture) while on the other side of the spectrum the differences could be huge and fundamental. One just have to call the things by its real names.
What alternative explanation - other than racism or ignorance - is there for that mistruth?
Shouting "culture!" doesn't really work as well.
This is false.
In fact - the evidence points much more strongly towards 'behaviour' than it does 'economic status'.
(By the way, I'm not making the case entirely that 'ethnicity is it' - rather, saying that there's tons of evidence to support it. I believe that it's rather more complicated).
'Economic status' is loosely correlated with crime in the USA for example. More crime is committed in poorer areas. Ok - so are they poor and therefore commit crime - or they have bad behaviours and are therefore poor?
The problem is - 'ethnicity' is considerably more correlated with crime, particularly violent crime.
For example, poor African Americans commit considerably more violent crime than their poor White or Asian peers.
Now - you could argue it's due to 'racism' etc. - and that's a good point, but it only goes so far.
Also - I'd argue that this is not about 'racism' - it's about 'ethnicity'. What is 'ethnicity' but a group of values, behaviours, norms, viewpoints, beliefs, patterns etc? Two groups with different ethnic backgrounds are likely to have very different outcomes overall in life. That's just reality - and it doesn't have to have anything to do with race.
I'm not actually making an argument one way or another - I think there's a lot to be said for how hard it is go grow up poor, or how hard it is to grow up facing racism and injustice - but at the same time - behaviours, mannerism, values etc. will define most of an individuals future - and those are passed down to children from their parents, and close community members, i.e. ethnicity. So it would be basically crazy to ignore this issue as well.
The level of rampant irrationality here is disheartening.
Whether these groups are over-represented because of socio-economic status, cultural factors, genetics or whatever seems largely irrelevant to me if you ask me, especially if you are reasoning about immigration in the context of public safety. None of these factors are controllable, and typically immigrants from distressed countries will both fall in the 'different culture' and 'low economic status' category at the same time. For public safety, the root cause why they are over-represented in 'bad lists' seems irrelevant to me.
Let's be clear that I don't mean to pass judgement on immigration policy, just pointing out that if you are creative with statistics you can prove or disprove almost anything to be related to everything, depending on your agenda. Correcting a statistic 'immigrants are over-represented in crime statistics' by saying 'but not compared to swedes with low economic status' seems like a pretty desperate attempt to paper over the fact that accepting large number of immigrants will not improve public safety, so to say.
[1] http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/
[2] http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?DM=SLNL&PA=81947...
In countries like India that could be clearly seen. Poverty alone does not account for the behavioral patterns. Education is the key. People knew this since antiquity, independently of a particular civilization - Indians knew this, Chinese knew this, you name it.
Street kids, usually members of a gang, who never have experienced transforming influence of the culture of a good school and a good teacher are definitely not the same as those who vent through one.
How about the Swedish government themselves?
- A 1996 BRA (Swedish Criminal statistics) study found that "there any indication that immigrants in Sweden are discriminated in the courts. Immigrant overrepresentation in registered crime is almost certainly real...nor is it caused by any generally lower social economic status (calculated as per SEI code) in Sweden."
- Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention determined that between 1985 and 1989 individuals born in Iraq, North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia),Africa (excluding Uganda and the North African countries), other Middle East (Jordan, Palestine, Syria), Iran and Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria) were convicted of rape at rates 20, 23, 17, 9, 10 and 18 greater than individuals born in Sweden respectively."
http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/05/08/br-1996-2-invandrares-...
Besides, socioeconomic factors to justify rape....really?
Also, my understanding of the words may be wrong but I didn't see anyone _justifying_ rape in this thread.
I asked the same question. In 2005 Bra released a report saying "Immigrants’ risk of being registered for crime has not changed in any pronounced way since the previous study conducted by the National Council, which related to the situation at the end of the 1980s".
https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...
Your claim was "What are your sources that try to prove that socioeconomic factors are not 'the major ones'?" so my question is 'what of rape'? This is the main crime making headlines. How does one explain it with socioeconomic factors? And even if you could, would that be a satisfactory explanation?
> Besides, socioeconomic factors to justify rape....really?
I'm sorry, but it is really difficult to have a serious conversation with someone unable to differentiate between the process of analyzing reasons for crimes and 'justifying' crimes. That is elementary stuff.
And your point doesn't even make sense. Are you saying rich, well educated muslims or african immigrants are still more likely to rape someone than a white person? Is your argument genetic? If that is not what you are implying - and I'll pay you the complement of assuming it's not, then you will have to at least consider socioeconomic factors.
That book was published by the goverment of Sweden. Does the host matter?
In 2005 BRA (Swedish Criminal statistics) published an update saying: "Immigrants’ risk of being registered for crime has not changed in any pronounced way since the previous study conducted by the National Council, which related to the situation at the end of the 1980s" Link: https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800010674/1...
> it is really difficult to have a serious conversation with someone unable to differentiate between the process of analyzing reasons for crimes and 'justifying' crimes.
Justification: "give grounds for, give reasons for, give a justification for". Pointing at socioeconomic factors is justifying the crimes by allusion to the circumstances of the crime.
Maybe you're confused it with 'condoning' which means something else.
So my point is, do we think we can analyze and find reason for aggravated rape within socioeconomic circumstances?
> Are you saying rich, well educated muslims or african immigrants are still more likely to rape someone than a white person?
Am I? I don't think that I am.
"show or prove to be right or reasonable"
2) > That book was published by the goverment of Sweden.
Probably, but pictures on "pdf-archive.com" are not a valid source since anyone can doctor them. It should be trivial and take a matter of minutes to find a link to the official government manual from a government site, if you're familiar with the study.
>So my point is, do we think we can analyze and find reason for aggravated rape within socioeconomic circumstances?
Possibly. We do not have any information that makes socioeconomic factors irrelevant, and comparable studies strongly tilt the balance in the favour of such an explanation.
Socioeconomic factors are significant factors: http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/violence.as...
As a side note: You seem to agree with your parent poster since you mention “well-educated people” which are most likely richer.
A culture, which is a set of shared values, views and behavioral patterns, defines a person more than just his income. Occupation is important, (think of the castes of India) but the modern world a truck driver could be a physicist or a philosopher could make and sell sandwiches.
"Commit the same level of crime as the subset of the population who commit the highest level of crime" does not sound very reassuring.
"In a later study, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden."
That means that the most important factor in terms of criminal activity is that immigrants are largely poor and poor commit more crimes. Not that rich immigrants perform as much crimes as the poorest of non-immigrants.
Or do you disagree with that assesment of what the study said?
This is when your biases are walking uninvited into a discussion about data.
http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/40ebdf12-8960-4d18...
Pointing us to "per-country religious belief surveys" is incredibly simplistic.
Which facts? What do you base this belief on? Any sources to any studies?
Swedens tiny population of 10 million can't handle immigration of tens of thousands? That's laughabale, it's been doing exactly that for decades now. Iraq, Iran, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Ukraine, Syria. Only recently has a resistance to these policies been seriously challenged...
Upwards mobility will happen, even during the worst conditions, like the slavery in US, did they manage to break free. This is not about when but how, true solidarity or true civil war and tragedy..
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
You should think very carefully about why you had an incorrect model of these people. You may be making similar mistakes in other areas.
> Swedens tiny population of 10 million can't handle immigration of tens of thousands?
Depends how you define "handle". If by "handle" you mean "avoid cultural erasure", then maybe not.
I'd also like to point out that it's tens of thousands per year. There are almost 100,000 Syrians in Sweden.
> Upwards mobility will happen
On what do you base this claim? Has upward mobility happened in the countries from which these refugees originate?
This is a classic red-herring.
'They were poor therefore they have bad behaviours'.
The failure of the logic is the assumption of correlation/causation.
One might argue that 'bad behaviour will lead one to being poor'.
I have no doubt that immigrants from Somalia will have a harder time than 'Sven Swede' growing up. At the same time, there are some truly terrible behaviours among specific immigrant groups.
This is the hardest part: the pro and anti immigrant camps are speaking past each other.
Important note: For some reason, ethnic minorities in Europe are considerably more marginalized then they are in the US - it's completely different.
Europe has a 'strong social safety net' - and 'social policy' of welfare etc. - BUT - they have very strong sense of ethnic identity, and very close social circles. A young Somalian may have very few Swedish friends.
In the US - people are far more gregarious and open personally. It's nothing to see a table of people of different ethnic backgrounds - but the social safety net is usually much weaker, no health insurance etc..
I live in Montreal, we have a good chunk of Muslims. They don't look too 'out of place'. You can't tell they are Muslim by looking. They could be Indian, Southern Italian, Greek.
But go to Belgium - the various Muslim communities are distinct, and ethnic identity is obvious. I've never seen a Burqa in Montreal, and Hijab not too often. In Belgium they are all over. Muslims live in 'broad areas' in Montreal, but in Belgium very specific communities.
It's a little bit of a mystery to me but I think it has everything to do with 'very traditional and conservative' social culture in Europe - even though paradoxically they are 'intellectually liberal'. Example: if you drink with a nice, well educated, open minded and kind Belgian - you may hear an 'African joke'. It's not considered as racist as it would be in America. Yet the Belgian will likely be more supportive of giving refuge and social services to the Africans than the average American. It's weird.
Sweden has a notorious degree of censorship in their press - they self-censor to control information in terms of what they 'deem is best for Sweden'. They will absolutely suppress information if it may cause some populist sentiment. It's just part of their culture.
The problem, of course, is that by suppressing real dialogue, then the loudest and craziest right-wing voices are the one's that get hard, and they cause a fuss, which is bad, and it may come to a breaking point.
I suggest that more transparency on the issues would be better for all involved.
I lost friends for dating outside my own percieved race. Folks seperate based on the color of their skin and background quite often. It isn't that folks don't break from the molds, but they are definitely there.
The little town didn't have many Muslims, so that wasn't as common, but it did have a fair amount of Mennonite communities in the area. Women with heads covered and conservative, long-sleeve dresses even during the hot summer months and men with beards. They generally kept to themselves, most likely due to cultural similarities. Some areas in the US have some section of Jewish coursts that handle some things and conservative Jews have a network within their communities (friend of mine, American, nearly went through an arranged marriage through them). These are probably much like many of the conservative Muslim communities you spotted - they are simply a different sort of conservative religion.
On the other hand, the majority of immigrant Muslims went to language class with are fairly progressive women. Lawyers and nurses and such. They stand out about as much as I do here in Norway.
I totally agree. America is a big place, so is Europe. It's varied.
But I would say, on the whole that EU is far more 'enclave-ish' than the US.
In fact, Europe is a big patchwork of ethnic enclaves.
America is not. People identify a lot less with their identity.
And yes, for sure, some people, i.e. Orthodox Jews, Mennonites etc. are different.
Can I just share my belief that this is polite fiction? It's certainly the view of America that we Americans have for ourselves, but can you honestly say you see evidence of it in day-to-day-life - and can you compare it to western Europe?
In my personal experience no, EU migrants are no more marginalized than they are here, and no, American migrants are no more "integrated". Vast swaths of SoCal and Texas is basically Mexico. Huge parts of Florida are basically Cuba. The Somali influx in Minnesota is real and highly separated from the rest of white society there. You don't need to look for ghettos to find large areas of extremely insular immigrants, often 2nd or 3rd generation still with no intention of or interest in immigrating in any sense other than physical location.
I'm not even commenting on if it's a good or bad thing, but ultimately I don't think we've EVER been the melting pot we claim to be, certainly the evidence around us doesn't suggest we are.
Had the melting pot not grown cold, we'd have a lot less internal conflict today.
I sense a similar difficulty in my native Germany, where so much of the current national identity is defined by feeling bad for something your grandparents maybe did (or by violently refusing to do so), that the absence of it in non-descendants of that generation is causing a noticeable "identity gap" even generations after immigration. This kind of stuff causes zero problems for those who have goals and education and achievement, but everybody else occasionally leans on group identity and will take whatever fits best.
P.S. I've actually come tho think that whatever ridiculous (from the German perspective, yes, totally ridiculous, if not outright scary) business Americans do with flags does serve a purpose after all. It gives both established and new Americans confidence that the new ones can belong, easing the process for everyone involved.
I live in Montreal and immigrants have the same problem: English or French? There is a 3rd category here (we use linguistic categories) - called 'Allophone' - meaning essentially neither English nor French, but 'multi' or 'something else'.
Despite the self-loathing of the past few generations - Germans are generally very German. A flag is a national symbol, not an ethnic one. Even the Nazis didn't use the flag of Germany - totally unnecessary!
'American' is not an ethnicity. All Americans have is the 'idea' of America. Which is represented by the flag.
In a way - 'nationalism' is more essential and necessary in a place like America.
Germany would be German with or without even the state of Germany.
America would disintegrate without national symbols.
In Canada - we are less nationalist because we are a British colony. Canadians had British passports up until very recently, just before I was born!
Mass migration is a new issue for Germany though - if it were just a few immigrants, it would be a non-issue. But the sheer scale of it makes it an existential issue, one that is akin to changing the Constitution - in fact - even stronger. A constitution can always be re-written. A nation can be rebuilt. But once a people decide that they are a 'nation' but not an ethnicity - and 'go multicultural' - there is no going back. I think that's a decision that should require a 'supermajority' vote type thing, not a decision made, de-facto in a 'crisis' policy by Merkel & Co. - obvious humanitarian issues notwithstanding.
That's probably why people want to stop importing them en masse.
That depends. If you are looking for excuses for racism, it obviously is not relevant. But if you claim that the Swedish society has turned dangerous because of the immigrant crimes, it should be highly relevant for the discussion.
Why is the conclusion that immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women racist? I don't think there are many people who believe the cause of this statistic is genetic.
I thought women should be safe regardless the perpetrator but there is this weird dual standard where the whole company Uber (correctly!) gets the blame because of it's douchebag culture even when some of it's key executives don't directly partake in denigrating women, yet when migrants dominate negative statistics in far worse crimes against women all of a sudden imagined racism is the worst crime instead of actually abuse of women.
I think the problem with that particular violent subset of the Muslim subset of immigrants is exactly what you try to blame other people for: right-wing asshole mysogonist gay jew or "soft men" (i.e. respectful mostly left wing so yes you) hating retards. With absolutely no ground for respect let alone a chance of a better life in a modern society. And you should fight them with the same energy you fight "native" right wing hate groups.
People fleeing from that kind of violent and oppressive people should not go to Sweden only to be confronted by exactly the same people they were trying to get away of.
First, if the very first sentence of wikipedia article of racism[1] tells that racism can be against a race or ethnic group, it should be accepted that the word "racism" is used not only to genetically different groups, but also against ethnic groups.
Second, your claim that immigrants dominate the statistics is wrong. They are over-represented. But even if we take that as your claim, no, the conclusion in itself is not racist. However, if you read what I wrote more carefully, that conclusion can be used as an excuse for racism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
Because it appears to be a made up conclusion for the purpose of stoking anti-immigrant sentiment. You have yet to provide a source. OP has sources. GP has sources. You have fear mongering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#Sweden
If you don't think WikiPedia is correct feel free to change the lemma, I bet they can use a certified statistician like you with all kinds of sources to prove them wrong. But until then:
Five times as much
And now I need to believe that I'm the one that needs to be corrected?
And another thing: once you split it up to region there's a bigger difference. East Asian and Western immigrants generally have lower or similar statistics compared to natives, meaning there are also groups that exceed the five times average.
Your original claim was:
> immigrants dominate the statistics of violence against women
Let's see what "dominate" means [1]:
to be predominant in
And further, predominant [2]:
being most frequent or common
There is simply nothing to discuss here. Your original claim was wrong, even using your own statistics. (Of course, you may have tried to say or you meant that immigrants are over represented, which would be correct. But you did not say that. Thus you are the one to be corrected.)
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dominate [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/predominant
That is again another discussion where it may be relevant.
I took a quite specific discussion ("Sweden has turned dangerous because of crimes by immigrants") and in that discussion the fact(?) that total crime numbers have not increased is very relevant.
Not necessarily the case because demographics are never homogeneously distributed across territory. If the rape/crime numbers didn't fall uniformly across the whole population, then you could have scenarios where crime fell by 20% in some regions and increased 25% in others, and overall it would be constant. I'm making up the numbers to illustrate.
More data would make your point much more convincing.
Segregation of areas is however becoming stronger, as many minorities like to live in their own ethnic enclaves.
It's possible that Sweden became safer because Swedes commit fewer crimes, and this decrease outweighed a crime increase caused by immigrants. Crime-by-nationality data would help resolve this question. Why is the Swedish government hiding it?
Source please? Because the available data, at least for Germany, does not support this claim at all.
Latest BKA report from first quarter of 2016 puts the amount of "offenses against sexual self-determination" for migrants at 1.10%. [1]
As somebody who's lived over 10 years right next to Bavaria's biggest initial reception center, in Zirndorf, I'm always amazed by all those claims as to how insanely criminal these people supposedly are. I've never witnessed anything like that, Zirndorf is actually quite peaceful town with barely anything ever happening.
[1]- https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/Themen/Siche...
In contrast, Syrian refugees seem to be among the most law-abiding foreigners you can find (followed by Iraqi refugees, as I recall).
"Immigrants" is a fairly useless category for criminological purposes, as it combines several other categories with vastly different profiles, some with outsized crime rates, some below that of natives.
Leif GW Persson is famous for writing books and being on tv shows - not for being a crime professor (and he is no longer a professor of criminology). There's a reason googling his name comes up with breitbart first, and goodreads second.
On the other hand this guy was in a relevant position. Is being a former professor of criminology different to currently being a professor?
This claim is false,
> (as confirmed by Sweden's most famous crime professor GW a couple of days ago)
and this attribution is also false.
He says that "if you look across the board on all convicted crimes it's half-half between natives and immigrants. But if you look at the more 'sensitive' crimes there is a significant over representation of immigrants"
Yet yeah it's covered up. Sure.
You must be joking. There is a huge amount of people who claim they don't. For example, these media outlets which many people find to be reputable:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/immigrants-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigran...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-bersani-piquero-i...
Or you could hear the (former) US ambassador to Sweden claim the increase of 1.5 million violent crimes in Sweden is not attributable to refugees (around 3:58) - "...does not mean that is somehow related to migrants." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFPjEM0Izpc
Yes, people are unscrupulous when it comes to statistics, that's definitely true. But "adjusting" for things is usually a way for people to get the result they want with the numbers. The government does this all the time with "seasonal adjustments" to housing and employment data. There never appears to be any rhyme or reason to the adjustments other than getting a better/desired number. Also, when people argue that it's because of socioeconomic factors or whatever else they may claim, that doesn't change the fact that they either do or do not commit more crimes. The reason for it can be discussed and addressed but many people try to use such an explanation as a way to weaken the fact that is presented.
I think the general citizen needs to become far more knowledgeable about math and statistics since they are always used to justify public policy nowadays. The common person is terrible at being able to weed out the bullshit that is presented by sources which all have agendas.
While "adjusting" may be used for misleading purposes, government seasonal adjustments generally used a disclosed-in-advamce methodology with a clear purpose; they only seem to have no rhyme or reason if you don't bother to do even the most basic checking.
An overview of seasonal adjustment at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is available at [0], and more detailed information about the specific methodology and factors used in particular series are readily available.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpisahoma.htm
This is very much like what my employer does for publishing public documents for financial compliance. We are required to publish a public methodology/rulebook for our products so that investors can, in theory, replicate everything we are doing on our side. In practice, though, forget it. No one can replicate it. The document serves to explain the concepts behind the product and the general guidelines, but no one can fully know the granular details that make all the difference.
It sounds like the same thing is going on here. No one can realistically be expected to take the same gigantic set of data, individually set a dozen or more parameters and run it through software and get the same result. And that's not even counting data sets that the "clean" by discarding certain outliers before running the model.
I said the link was a general overview of seasonal adjustment used in data series by the BLS, and that they provide additional detail the about the specific methodology used in specific series elsewhere.
But the key part from that summary relevant to your comment upthread is that not only are the specific methodologies for particular series published in advance, but the resulting adjustment factors for future time periods are determined and published in advance, before the data to be adjusted exists.
One may disagree with the methodology or the figures, but neither is the methodology opaque nor are the factors chosen to get desired results (since the actual raw data, and thus the factors necessary to get produce desired results, are not available.)
Doing these kinds of adjustments is not dishonest if done correctly and in these circumstances it's often absolutely necessary to produce useful stats.
How stats are to be massaged depends on what argument one tries to make though. There are valid arguments from uncontrolled data too.
An example could be e.g "the immigrants we allow in are going to be unemployed and poor which means we are going to get more crime, I don't want that so I'm against immigration" - this is an entirely valid argument to make from uncontrolled data.
This is a two step argument: immigrants are poor and poor people more criminal.
This is not the same as saying "immigrants commit more crimes" because if unqualified such a statement always assumes controlling for relevant factors.
Also, "if done correctly" is a huge assumption with everyone having an agenda in the current climate.
But what I was trying to get at is not that the argument should just be with that one uncontrolled data point. My issue is that society can't even agree on that basic, top level data point to arrive at the first-stage fact of whether immigrants do/don't commit more violent crime. Everyone would have to agree on that first, then they can dig into the "all else being equal" scenarios where you control for the other factors that influence crime.
This makes you a "right wing thug" for many people in Europe. Europe is lost. They lost their immunity for enemies of their open society. Uneducated immigrants from violent tribal societies will first make the social system implode, then the society.
Sweden: Rape Capital of the West https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape
Everything is factual in that statement but seems to burst some peoples bubble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Sweden
"Please note that when using the figures, any cross-national comparisons should be conducted with caution because of the differences that exist between the legal definitions of offences in countries, or the different methods of offence counting and recording."
http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/...
The problems with what you are doing are:
1. You are citing a right-wing think tank. I know that all sources have bias, but this is not even pretending to be an objective one. It's a poor source for data.
2. That think tank bases it's analysis on UN data which explicitly points out that it is not suitable for direct international comparison.
I do not personally know if an increase in immigration in Sweden's resulted in more sexual violence, but I am absolutely certain that we will not figure that out using the sort of facile "why do you love rapists so much" shit that you are spewing.
> if a person comes to the police and reports being raped by a partner or husband every day for the past year, the police will record each of these events. In many other countries these incidents would be recorded just once: one victim, one type of crime and one record.
For example, if you have 100 "native" Germans and 10 refugees, and there were 3 German criminals and 1 refugee criminal, 10% of refugees would be criminals, but only 3% of Germans, even though more Germans than refugees would be criminals.
Based on your link, it seems clear that the rates went up in 2015 (unless I am grossly misreading that graph).
For 2014 it was a little less than 2%. For 2015 it is more than 3%.
"In 2015, a total of 18,100 sex offences were reported; this is an 11 per cent decrease as compared with 2014. The number of rapes reported to police decreased by 12 per cent to 5,920 between 2014 and 2015. Reported offences regarding sexual molestation and sexual coercion, exploitation etc. also decreased to 8,840 (-8 %) and 1,430 (-6 %) respectively. "
Why picking the period 2005 to 2014? Immigration started 1960s and increased a lot 2014-2016. It would make a lot more sense to look at the sexual violence rate 1960-2016. Do you dare?
Never trust any statistics that you didn't... - Believe this or go with the anecdotal real-world experience from a cop, linked below, Peter Springare, see e.g. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/764574/Political-Sweden-.... Never read about it in 'good' newspaper before. So who knows? The politic is under much pressure to tell the 'right' things now.
I just wish they would just tell the delicate numbers, e.g. ethnical, religious, economic, <whatever> background of inmates, terror, crime. And allow to talk about it freely. We now are a data driven society, why not here? Why afraid?
Why not give (collect) the full data? (I browsed around a bit, but I think I would need more detailed raw data to say something)
>> People from foreign backgrounds are suspected of crimes more often than people from a Swedish background. According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
And even this isn't really what we're looking for because accusations != convictions. One can easily postulate that foreigners would have higher chances of being falsely accused, and factors like this have to be accounted for in the analysis.
The only factual evidence that we have to go on so far is otalp's reference to a study that showed German refugees are less likely to commit crimes than the average citizen.
Sadly, in this kind of argument, facts rarely matter and will likely not change erroneous views.
2014 is a funny time to end the analysis... We are in 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1_viPSD-bY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lsoZ0uDOGY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Qwr6KvmUc
Most of the tweets I see from this account are either rabble-rousing ("And that's because migrants are nothing but voter cattle for the Left"; "Share this video and help me reveal the immense hipocrisy of our "feminist" Swedish government.") or complaints about media in general (from the Trump style media conspiracy angle to thoughts on how Youtube is banning him because he didn't get as many watches as a Tucker Carson video.)
If you share the same world view as the Swedish Democrats, you'll probably agree with this person's viewpoint. If you don't, you probably won't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The refugee problem cannot be solved by "not accepting refugees". That's not a viable solution.
What should be done differently? Building huge internment camps? Would the human suffering really be smaller in those camps than it has been in society as a whole now through crime etc? I doubt it.
Those who argue that the wave of refugees caused so much problems rarely present any solutions.
Non-refugee immigration on the other hand (of which Sweden had had lots) thats a different matter. But somehow that's not the focus of this recent debate.
Even using hand picked numbers to try and alleviate people's fears, they have to admit that the main assumptions about immigrant crime are correct and that many areas are in fact turning into "shitholes", for lack of a better term.
Remember: Downvote, and make sure you don't notice any patterns. Anything else is crimethink.
It's shocking to me that "grenade attacks" have virtually become an every day occurrence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_S...
Refugee centers have already been burned down in several instances, and anti-migrant sentiment is growing.
I really don't see how the large scale immigration going on in a Europe is going to result in a positive result, at least in short term over the next few generations.
I think it's incredibly irresponsible to encourage migration without being able provide productive meaningful lives to the migrants. People are not pets.
CTRL+F "device" and you'll find 16 occurrences.
These are IEDs. This is terrorism. Where did they learn to make them?
It's the same with the anti-tank mines (I'm not even joking.)
Homs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoRdCbDd50o
I'm pretty sure immigrants are better off in Sweden even with the anti-immigrant sentiment.
WikiLeaks @wikileaks Swedish media admits to censoring stories for the last five years on migrant crime
It starts here. I've scraped it with some regexs:
https://twitter.com/Jake_Hanrahan/status/834537369432911872
Thread: Both left and right are talking a lot of nonsense about the situation in #Malmo. I was there four weeks ago, reporting on the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ahmed Obaid, an Iraqi-Swede immigrant with a bright future ahead of him. Here’s some actual info for anyone not interested in the shrieking leftist eye covering or racist right wing exaggeration that is surrounding #Malmo atm.
Ahmed (police, family & gang members all agree he was innocent & not affiliated with gangs) was one of three murders in Malmo in Jan 2017. In that month, there were 13 shootings, a small IED explosion and a hand grenade thrown into the lobby of a police station. Statistically this was a sharp increase in violence.
People pretending there's no problem with gang violence in #Malmo need to get real. The problems in #Malmo stem from many things. One big issue is how the Swedish government seems to have pushed its large migrant population in #Malmo into a corner and tried to forget about them.
This, coupled with the lack of employment and easy access to weapons across from Denmark and from the Balkans, has of course created a problem. The unemployment rate for foreign-born men between 16 and 64 in #Malmo is 30%. That compares with 8% nationally. (despite what the Trump lot with their half mast Pepe hard-ons and Wotsit fingers might claim).
A lack of skilled work, discrimination, housing issues, failed assimilation and ridiculously lenient laws toward violence (sorry lefties) all plays a role in the very real problems Malmo is facing. There’s also a huge lack of support for the police in #Malmo from the Swedish government. They don’t have enough officers, are under resourced & with Sweden's laws their power to lock up criminals they do catch, is diminished.
Police in #Malmo seized ~600 weapons in 2016. Some semi-auto rifles & hand grenades. From ’16 there’re also 13 currently unsolved murders. Whilst reporting in #Malmo, I spoke to the family of Ahmed Obaid, a gangster parading around the streets in a bullet proof vest and with a policeman about all of this. They all agreed, that yes, there IS a big problem in #Malmo and it is being largely ignored.
Unfortunately it’s now blown up (excuse the pun) in a way that isn’t currently shedding light on anything of substance. You have the right wing pretending there are no go zones (there’s aren’t, that’s bullshit), non-stop rape and daily explosions, and you have the left who’re pretending it’s all milk, honey and racist propaganda. Ignoring the situation in #Malmo doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and exaggerating why doesn’t make it so.
TL;DR - #Malmo has a problem with gang related violence, but this cannot be blamed entirely on immigrants, it also cannot be ignored.
Trump Is Right: Sweden’s Embrace of Refugees Isn’t Working https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-is-right-swedens-embrace-...
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/how-sweden-became-an-exam...
"How Sweden became an example of how not to handle immigration"
By Tove Lifvendahl, political editor-in-chief at Svenska Dagbladet.
(She gets away with saying these things since she is adopted from Korea.)
Out of the eight parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament they are currently the most popular party, polling at 26.9%.
Source:
http://nyheteridag.se/nytt-sd-rekord-i-sentio-pa-otroliga-26...
And Nyheter Idag is basically the Breitbart of Sweden.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinionsm%C3%A4tningar_inf%C3%... (In Swedish, but the stats don't need translating. SD denotes the Sweden Democrats)
Anyway, this is a good resource: http://status.st/
Those refugees are mostly good people. They escaped war. That must count as a glorious success?
Whether Sweden is better off or slightly worse off (yes we have more crime, more public expenses, etc) is secondary. Obviously there is a limit to what Swedes will accept - but even debating this issue without acknowledging the positive side of it (people being safe) is completely mental.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.springare/posts/1020830068234...
Translation: I'm so fucking tired. What I will write here below, is not politically correct. But I don't care. What I'm going to promote you all taxpayers is prohibited to peddle for us state employees. That tends to drive in a non-career and non-individual pay. Even though it's true. I don't care about all of this, will soon still retire after 47 years in this activity. I will now and every week to explain in detail what for employing me as investigators / investigator on coarse mcu police in örebro. It's not going to be good with the opinion or other leftist kriminologers perception in the general debate.
Our pensioners is on its knees, the school's a mess, healthcare is an inferno, the police have totalhavererat etc etc. We all know why but no one dare or wants to peddle the reason, due to the fact that Sweden always lived on the myth of prudes ultimate society who have osinnliga resources to be at the forefront when it comes to be the only politically correct option in a dysfunctional world that beats Knot on their own by destructive behavior in different name of. Here we go; this I've handled Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, off of, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, Rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again Christopher... what is it true. Yes a Swedish name snuck on the outskirts of a drug crime, Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.
Countries representing the weekly all crimes: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. Half of the suspects, we can't be sure because they don't have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that they're lying about your nationality and identity.
Now we're talking just örebro municipality. And these crimes occupies our utredningsförmåga to 100 %.
So it looks here and has been like for the past 10-15 years.
Return next Friday with a statement for the past week 🇸🇪
National economist Tino Sanandaji has been writing about how BRÅ (Brottsförebyggande rådet) has ceased to make statistics about immigration-rateld crime, for political reasons.
He published a book about this subject [1], and it's quite a success, but libraries are refusing to buy it because it is "inciting hatred". ("Mein Kampf" and very many extreme-left books are still available from the same libraries, they are not "inciting hatred".)
Tino Sanandaji and people like Hanif Bali are, however, able to write about the subject without much fear or prosecution, because they have a Middle-East immigrant background themselves.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massutmaning
[edit:typos]
And the fact that people from the Middle East would have more room to maneuver in discussions about racism without being accused of racism is hardly surprising.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445237/sweden-crime-ra...
Let's go and convince all the victims of crimes in recent years that they're just imaginging things and they're safer then ever. And hand out more "don't grope me" bracelets for extra protection[1].
[1] http://www.thelocal.se/20160629/swedish-police-to-hand-out-a...
[edit] Classic HN, don't forget to upvote the guy who says physically assaulting people with different opinions is OK.[2] Sounds tolerant and progressive.
Ban my account, but the comments can stay for exposing your collective hypocrisy for the future. Goodbye.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723296
No one has said crimes haven't happened. Your post is a giant straw man.
I do know that I won't support the same policy in my country though, because just avoiding the risk of such crimes is with a measure like this is worth enough.
If it can't, then perhaps the community isn't that special after all.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
OK, so you have statistics that show that you are right. What you going to do with them? Start discriminating against every single individual of that particular ethnic group?
Use them to guide immigration policy in order to protect your citizens.
Facts matter.
The United States, a country with roughly 16,000 murders a year and 90,000 rapes [1], where a violent crime occurs roughly occurs every 26.3 seconds and a rape every 4.2 minutes [2] is focused on the volume of crime in Sweden.
This is a level of delusion and farce that is without precedent. We've entered a true Twilight Zone where people have completely disconnected from reality and are now truly just fantasizing about symbols that have no connection to reality. The whole "Sweden debate" really shows what direction this country is going in and it's just remarkable.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-rel... [2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...