Who's Afraid of Scandinavia's Crime Statistics?
by Judith Bergman • October 4, 2019 at 5:00 am
"Most immigrants are not criminals, but when the immigrant population is overrepresented in almost every crime category, then there is a problem that we must dare to talk about." — Jon Helgheim, immigration policy spokesman for the Norwegian party Fremskrittspartiet (FrP).
"In the more than thirty years that the surveys cover, one tendency is clearer than all others, namely that the proportion of the total amount of crimes committed by persons with a foreign background is steadily increasing...." — Det Goda Samhället ("The Good Society"), Invandring och brottslighet – ett trettioårsperspektiv ("Immigration and crime – a thirty-year perspective"). All statistics for the report were supplied by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Unless Scandinavian political leaders begin actively to engage with the facts that these statistics describe, the problems are only going to become more intractable -- to the point where they may be entirely unsolvable.
In Sweden, discussing who is behind the current crime epidemic in the country has long been taboo. Such a statistic has only been published twice by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ), in 1996 and in 2005. In 2005, when BRÅ published its last report on the subject, "Crime among people born in Sweden and abroad," it contained the following note:
