There _are_ "no-go zones" in Sweden

Continuing the discussion from Meet the Sweden Democrats, a creepy far-right nationalist group:

[quote=“redesigned, post:84, topic:69760, full:true”]

Political hogwash, racist asswipes have used the term “no go zones” as a propaganda term to instill fear about immigrants.[/quote]
This story includes a link to the Swedish police report that has a map of the no-go zones.

The introduction of the report linked in the article through Google Translate. (Swedish is not a language I speak.)

In Sweden, there are currently 55 geographical areas where local criminal networks is considered to have
negative impact on the local community. The areas are spread across 22 cities - from big cities
to smaller towns and considered socio-economically disadvantaged. The big criminals
the impact on the local community appears to be linked to the social context in the area
applicants rather than on the willingness of criminals to take power and control of the local community.

The criminal actors in areas not seem to be included in the structured gangs, but rather in
loosely connected networks, broad-based youth environment. They are generally considered
have low strategic capability. There are a few exceptions in urban areas, where a
few network described as more structured and considered as having a higher strategic capability.

Players can be divided into a younger and an older layer to some extent tied together
of kinship. The younger is usually included in the loosely connected criminal networks centered
around a few key people. Their crime is less complex and consists
often drug sales to the abuse stage, thefts and burglaries in the neighborhood. The
older people are more structured and is involved in more organized crime such as
advanced thefts and organization of drug supply to the regions.
Prevalent crime among local criminals areas include open
drug trafficking, criminal showdowns that manifests itself in serious violence on
public place, various forms of extortion and unlawful influence and acting out
dissatisfaction with society. All of the above expressions manifests public criminal
power and become a reminder of what the criminal actors are capable of. The
along with active pressure on the local community in the form of threats, violence
and blackmail assumed to be the basis for the fear police believe exist in the local community.
The fear manifests itself in that it is difficult to get people to participate in the legal process
against local criminals.
Developments in the areas has led to difficulties in investigating crimes. Police have also in other
respects difficult to work in these areas, including due to the surroundings
reacting against police during interventions or by attacking the police vehicles.
Police difficulties with curbing the above problems can be a contributing factor
that the public in many cases perceive that it is the criminals who control the area
procedures. Such a view may be contested role of the police as a guarantor of security, and
term reduces the public’s inclination to turn to the police. The situation in these areas
is worrying and has in several cases meant that police have not been able to fulfill its
task.

This sounds like there are criminal gangs operating in Swedish immigrant communities. It sounds pretty mild compared to the breathless panic in *sigh* The Daily Caller. Reading further through the garble of Google Translate, it sounds a lot like pretty typical organized crime. The Yakuza are comparable in terms of providing independent dispute resolution. In the past, there were neighborhoods here in the United States where immigrant communities were hostile to local law enforcement. In other words, I fail to see this as being a specifically Muslim-oriented problem. I mean, there are a lot of drugs involved for one thing. That’s hardly something condoned by Shariah law.

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Whee! This is fun! I found links too!

http://rec.gambling.poker.narkive.com/mEY1EHHe/inside-sweden-s-terrifying-no-go-zones-a-photo-essay

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My neighbourhood is swarming with Nordics! Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?

Heavily armed thugs! Norwegian and Swedish flags everywhere! Why won’t they integrate properly or go back to Nordland? I don’t feel safe going outside any more.

What kind of integration is this?

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“The situation is slipping from our grasp,” he says about infamous enclaves Tensta and Rinkeby. “If we’re in pursuit of a vehicle, it can evade us by driving to certain neighborhoods where a lone patrol car simply cannot follow, because we’ll get pelted by rocks and even face riots. These are No-Go Zones. We simply can’t go there.”

http://swedenreport.org/2015/05/18/police-yes-there-are-no-go-zones-in-sweden/

This is a translation of a quote by a police officer given in a report in a scientific journal in Sweden. They actually use the English term in the Swedish text. “Det är no-go-areas.”

The term has also been used in the Swedish media. Here’s the headline from one news story in Swedish: “55 ”no go”-zoner i Sverige.”

But there was a map! A map! There couldn’t be a map if it wasn’t true! The whole Glenn Beck nine yards - Caliphate. Sharia, the whole schmeer. Also, it’s probably Obama’s fault.

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From the links you’re citing, I see no reason to doubt there is organized crime in Sweden and that it’s gotten pretty bad. What I fail to see is how this means that the Sweden Democrats aren’t racists and how this accords with their vision of reality. I also fail to see what this has to do with multiculturalism. From the links it looks like the Swedish authorities failed to nip organized crime in the bud while it was still weak.

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That’s a pretty hysterical obfuscation. A map of the no-go zones in a scientific journal in Sweden is the equivalent of the rantings of Glenn Beck? Really?

The fof.se article defines the no-go areas as “Swedish law does not apply”, a few paragraphs later it’s clarified: The 55 neighborhoods do have (for Swedish norms?) high levels of crime like an open drug scene or public violence.

Higher crime levels suck, but calling those zones “no-go areas” is FUD.

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Ten of the thirteen organized criminal gangs in Sweden are made up of Muslim immigrants, and this is just organized crime, not street crime and violence in these so-called “no-go zones.”. If this isn’t startling, then I don’t know what is. Accusations of “racism” here are just dog whistles by blindered ideologues who sincerely wish there wasn’t a major problem in Sweden with large groups of immigrants (not all) who have failed to assimilate successfully into Swedish culture and society.

Problem is, there is a problem. Sweden is a small country. It used to be homogenous. Why is it idiomatically (and ideologically) a given that it should open its doors so wide to immigration as to be overwhelmed by it?

You don’t really know what a - literal or figurative - dog whistle is, do you?

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So really, not that startling. Organized crime is a reality anywhere you have low upward mobility and poor relationships with wider society. Immigrant communities tend to have this issue. It’s avoidable, if you pay any attention to history.

First off, I’m not sure you know what an idiom is. If you’re going to use big words, know what they mean, please. What is an idiomatic, ideological given? We know what a “given” is; it’s a well-established word with a well-established meaning, so it’s not really an idiom. All abstract “givens” are ideological or cognitive, you don’t add information by saying it’s ideological unless you want to talk about the metaphysics of ideology. You don’t strike me as the type to talk about freedom from ideology, and that’s not the context of the discussion. Your qualifiers are either redundant or nonsensical. Putting that horrible butchering of the English language aside, you’re conflating organized crime with Muslims and immigration. I would put it down to a number of other sociological factors that tend to be common to criminal gangs worldwide. This isn’t about being “overwhelmed” by immigration. It sounds a lot like letting certain neighborhoods go to the dogs, alienating a population, and then acting surprised when those neighborhoods aren’t safe anymore. It’s not like this kind of thing has never been seen before in other societies:

The Watts Rebellion cited above was an important part of the genesis of the now world-famous street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods. You’re trying to take a criminal phenomenon and project it onto a transnational issue in a way that doesn’t make sense.

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No surprise to me you can find reports of no-go zones because of Muslims in Sweden. People have also said the same about France, England, and the US. Of course eventually the truth gets its pants on, and it’s all just the usual xenophobic fiction (e.g. snopes, Media Matters, The Atlantic, Bloomberg from wikipedia). But hey, I’m sure there’s no reason to question the claims this country has them.

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According to a Brå report (Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention) the main groups involved in organised crime are Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, Original Gangsters, Angereds Tigrar, Brödraskapet and A.S.I.R.

The first three are bread-and-butter bike gangs without special Muslim connections… The report is slightly dated (published 2008) but I don’t believe that the organised crime in Sweden was overturned in less than a decade.

A 2013 notice of the BKA (“German FBI”) about an conference with the topic ‘organized crime in Scandinavia’ lists as main players motorcycle clubs, Russian mafia, gangs from East Europe and immigrants from the middle east: Christian Assyrians, mostly concentrated in Södertälje; it seems they created a problematic parallel societiy.

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It certainly looks like nothing out of the ordinary in standard ‘bad neighborhood’ practice, as practiced by basically anybody under the wrong circumstances. That said, they call conditions like that ‘bad’ for a reason, so it’s hard to fault swedes who are displeased by the presence and number of such locations.

Any who think that they are that way because of some special depravity of the migrant is fooling themselves; but the result is lousy whether imported or domestic.

Anyone know what Sweden has, or doesn’t, in the way of similarly blighted local flavor? If it actually exists in quantity; but isn’t scary because it doesn’t jabber in its heathenish tongue, than they should probably adopt a sense of perspective; but if they do have a robust correlation going it’s not terribly tricky to understand why they might be displeased with the prospect of more immigrants.

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AGAIN if you read the article that you linked to, it is because of gangs, biker gangs, made up mostly of people of swedish decent, NOT immigrants. Not sure why anyone would double down on defending being racist.

The swedish police do go into these zones, they just require another unit for backup.

NO, no they aren’t. Read the article you linked to. OR how about lookup the gangs involved.

No, I think the accusation of racism are because you are saying some pretty racist shit that is mostly wrong.

This is still accurate today. The Muslim Immigrant blame card is racist and dead wrong. These gangs are mostly not Muslim. These are gangs and organized crime and the problem existed prior to the influx of Muslim immigrants. Even the article AngingDaxon links to states this, to bad they are cherry picking the info that they feel fits their narrative.

It makes me sad that someone is even coming into this community trying to spout racist immigrant blame propaganda. Even if the crime was Muslim immigrants, anyone who thinks that the criminal element of any culture or society is representative of an entire group of people, is racist and wrong. The immigration vetting process is pretty thorough and most the people who have immigrated there are wonderful people. Sweden is increasing the number of immigrants they are accepting, if they felt immigrants were the problem would they be increasing the number they are taking?

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I’m not sure that that’s entirely fair: It’s certainly the case that the criminal phenomenon plays out largely the same no matter who the people currently in question are(and, since we tend to forget or romanticize the criminal networks that have collapsed sufficiently, the new guys always seem super scary, while the rampaging mobs of abhuman papist degenerates have been replaced by ‘kiss me, I’m Irish’ tat and Ye Olde Stereotpe Pub; and the Italian mob is remembered largely for The Godfather and helping keep us from going thirsty during prohibition).

However, if you treat “How about we just don’t have a next set of new arrivals?” as a serious policy option; then the transnational issue and the criminal phenomenon are immediately connected. To be sure, there is no reason to believe that this batch of new arrivals will be much better or worse than the last one, or the one before that; but, precisely because of the criminal phenomenon you describe, it’s a decent bet that your latest dislocated new arrivals are at nontrivial risk of going through a criminal phase.

If you treat this as some special indictment of this particular batch, you ignore history; but since [quote=“ActionAbe, post:13, topic:69823”]
rganized crime is a reality anywhere you have low upward mobility and poor relationships with wider society. Immigrant communities tend to have this issue. It’s avoidable, if you pay any attention to history.
[/quote]

the possibility of preventing the formation of new immigrant communities is a fairly plausible mechanism for avoiding the formation of related organized crime groups. Unlikely to be the nicest way; but it would work.

Right, but I’m not saying that there is no relationship between the transnational issue and the criminal phenomenon. To quote myself (emphasis added):

I’m saying that the relationships drawn by the @AnglingSaxon with peculiarity to this demographic is to, essentially, drive a square peg down a round hole. It’s not that the issues are not linked, but I think it’s fair to argue against a specialness in the dynamic. All such situations will have their own distinctive features, but it’s not like we’ve never seen this before and the response should be panic.

Right, but that cuts right to the heart of things, doesn’t it?

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I just don’t think that is true. Organized crime will pop up anywhere there is a slight power vacuum and a modicum of corruption.

And ‘no go zone’ is just… Ugh, how do I even say this. There are areas in every major city I’ve been to that I wouldn’t go to by myself, populated by people that have been there longer than I’ve been alive (I’m not yelling at you, just emphasizing).

Multiculturalism is to crime as a Tiramisu is to, err, uh, a giant Sequoia.

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