As several shootings and deaths in Sweden are being attributed to gang violence, the prime minister decided to directly address the country following a deadly explosion.
After an explosion was reported yesterday in Uppsala, a city 70 km (43 mi) north of Sweden, which killed a 25-year-old woman, the prime minister gave a speech responding to several murders in Sweden. The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson of the center-right Moderate Party, said that gangs are responsible for these continuous murders. He said that the government would change its legislation to address gang violence, via stricter migration and surveillance policy assisted by the Swedish military.
Kristersson referenced six different murders that had occurred in the country over the last two weeks. Sweden had more murders in 2020 than in any other year since the oldest recorded year of 2002, according to data from The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. The year 2022 had 116 instances of lethal violence. The month of September 2023 has already had several murder cases.
In response to the wave of crime, Kristersson said the government’s “naivety” and “cluelessness” are the causes, which he said they would correct by denying more migrants entry into the country. “While immigration increases to Europe, it decreases to Sweden,” Kristersson said.
Preventive wiretapping and search zones
Kistersson has criticized Sweden’s migration policies before, being a focal point of the 2022 general election. Sweden’s liberal immigration policies allowed them to take in hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015, policies that Kristersson’s government changed.
Starting on October 1st, Kistersson said there will be a preventive wiretapping measure instituted in Sweden. By the prime minister’s words, it seems as if the police will be able to listen to domestic calls. We were not able to provide more details on this new policy at the time of writing.
On July 1st, 2023, Sweden passed laws doubling the sentence for gang-related crimes and added a law against recruiting children.
The prime minister said the government was going to create “search zones” as well, where people will be searched for weapons.
He said he had summoned the commander-in-chief of the armed forces to assist the police in these programs. Assisting in internal conflicts is not necessarily a part of the Armed Forces’ duties, which are usually more focused on assisting in international conflict, “to defend Sweden and its territories against armed attacks,” and “safeguarding national sovereign rights and interests in areas outside the territory.”
In passing measures to prevent gang violence, Kristersson mentioned near the end of his speech that he hoped that all parties in the Swedish Parliament would be able to find agreement.
Currently, Sweden is governed by a right-wing coalition majority formed by Kristersson’s Moderate Party and two other right-wing parties. The party with the largest number of votes in Parliament is the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that wants to “keep organized crime out” via a strict migration policy and is “not afraid to challenge the status quo,” according to their website. The government needs the Sweden Democrats to get a majority in the Riksdag.