Denmark is one of the safest countries in the world.
But these last months were remarkable.
On July 24th, there was a shooting in central Copenhagen
and a 16 year old boy from Sweden was arrested.
A week later,
another person was shot
and again the suspect was a teenager from Sweden.
These kids are often recruited on telegram
with messages like these,
which offer $48,000 for a job in Denmark.
The next day in Copenhagen, there was an explosion.
The day after, there was a double shooting.
This was the third incident
with Swedish criminals in one week.
The police set up security zones
where they could stop and search people
without probable cause.
Copenhagen lies just a bridge away from Sweden,
where gang related crime has been spiraling out of control.
This is blamed on the poor integration of immigrants.
This led in 2022
to the first right wing government
to be elected since the 1930s,
Sweden and Denmark in recent years
were polar opposites with regards to immigration policy.
Denmark was unusually strict
and wanted to do the bare minimum,
whereas Sweden
had some of Europe's most generous asylum policies.
But Sweden's new right wing government is taking a U-turn,
and they're looking at Denmark for inspiration.
While Denmark is tightening its border security.
This is how Sweden's gang violence is spreading to Denmark...
with Hindsight.
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Now back to the video.
The Swedish welfare state is world famous.
Sweden's quality of life,
public health and educational performance
rank amongst the best in the world.
They have relatively high equality rates and low poverty rates,
and they consistently rank
amongst the happiest people on Earth.
At the height of the migrant crisis in 2015,
Swedes showed incredible compassion
and opened their country.
This led to a number of asylum seekers
to increase substantially in the mid 2010s.
But that's where it went wrong.
They disproportionately ended up in poor neighborhoods
where over the years, parallel societies emerged.
First and second generation immigrants are now
nine times more dependent on government welfare,
and almost half of them is unemployed.
Immigrants are often segregated in poor communities.
In the most extreme cases.
like the Stockholm suburb Rinkeby,
nearly 90% of the population
has an immigration background.
This led to social exclusion and in turn to gang formation.
As gun violence was going down
in other parts of the EU,
in Sweden it was going up.
Stockholm now has roughly 30 times
more gun violence than London,
and Sweden has the highest
gun crime death rate per capita in the EU.
Sweden had been incredibly generous with its asylum laws,
but they failed to integrate new arrivals.
Denmark was the opposite,
and they saw Sweden as a cautionary tale.
In 2017, in Rinkeby,
the police arrested a man on suspicion of dealing drugs,
after which 20 to 30 masked men
gathered near the site and clashed with the police.
The rioting lasted for four hours
and several cars were set on fire.
This was big news in Denmark, and the following year
they passed the so-called ghetto laws,
aiming to rid Denmark of ghettos by 2030.
These laws were condemned in the international media
because they targeted non-Western immigrants
and forced them to integrate
It became mandatory to put children in daycare
for 25 hours per week,
or you would risk losing your welfare payments
and sentences for crimes in these ghettos
were automatically doubled.
The current Prime Minister took office around that time
and then continued these trends.
Denmark became the first European country
to start deporting Syrian refugees,
and she outlawed donations from Qatar and Saudi Arabia
to mosques in Denmark.
Sweden's officials criticized Denmark.
But public opinion in Sweden also was beginning to shift.
In late 2018,
89 cars were set on fire in
11 different locations in southern Sweden.
The following night, five more were torched.
In April 2022,
a Danish politician announced his plans
to visit Sweden to hold public Koran burnings.
Riots broke out throughout the country.
These events intensified discussions
about the challenges of multiculturalism,
free speech and immigration policies,
and it led to a once fringe party to gather support
A spokesman of the Sweden Democrats posted a tweet
with the image of a metro in their party's colors,
and the text reads welcome aboard the Repatriation Express.
Next up, Kabul.
The Sweden Democrats had always been isolated
by other parties
because of their fascist roots,
but they claim to have distanced themselves from this past
one of their catchphrases was to make Sweden great again.
This rhetoric worked,
and in the 2022 elections,
they won a remarkable 20% of the votes.
The Sweden Democrats were down to largest party
in a right wing coalition.
And they announced sweeping plans to begin the process.
They denounced to cut benefits
and to streamline deportation.
Their goal was to make Sweden,
an unattractive destination for refugees
and to follow in Denmark's footsteps.
Some of their plans were even tougher.
The proposed snitch law would force public sector workers,
like doctors and teachers,
to report any contact with undocumented people,
which could lead to them being deported.
Sweden also started investigating their own ghetto laws.
They wanted to put a 50% cap of non Nordic citizens in ghettos.
But is this integration or discrimination or both?
And they're offering financial rewards for immigrants
wanting to leave the country.
Critics argue
that these policies are completely missing the point
in that the real causes of crime are poverty,
racism and social exclusion,
and that this was only going to make it worse.
During their first full year in office.
The number of asylum seekers
went down to the lowest point
since 1997,
and for the first time in 50 years, Sweden had net migration,
mostly due to foreign
born residents from Iraq, Somalia and Syria
who decided to leave the country.
But crime levels are still unaffected.
The number of shootings last year
was about the same as during previous years.
And so far, 2024
has a similar number of shootings
as the previous year in the same month.
In fact, last year in September,
Sweden had a record number of monthly fatal shootings.
It started with the murder of a 58 year old woman in Uppsala,
who turned out to be the mother
of one of Sweden's gang leaders.
The police suspected that his former partner
commissioned the attack,
and the two gangs have been at war ever since.
The leaders of these gangs live in Iraq,
Lebanon and Turkey,
and they use apps like Signal and Telegram
to recruit freelance criminals.
An Apple emoji means throwing a grenade
a water pistol, murder.
Yes, combating
the number of asylum seekers is one thing,
but rooting out crime is much more complex.
Sweden also adopted the Danish security zones,
which allows the police
to perform searches of people and cars
without the suspicion of a crime.
A month after it came into effect in Norrköping
two men were executed in an apartment building.
The police suspected that this was linked to organized crime
and decided to establish a security zone.
It lasted for two weeks
as required by law,
and 368 people and 41 cars were searched.
The second security zone was established only
a week later near Stockholm.
But here's the problem.
The day after it ended,
a hand grenade was thrown into a shop.
The next day, there was another gang related shooting.
These security zones are hardly effective
at addressing the root cause of the problem.
There is a lot of work to be done
and a lot of policy to debate, but in the meantime,
criminal organizations
are expanding their business to Denmark
and even to Finland and Norway.
This toxic environment is partly blamed
on the poor integration of migrant communities.
But that's just one of the many underlying societal issues
that Sweden needs to address.
If it wants to get this escalating violence under control.
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