The number of people killed as a result of deadly violence in Sweden has fallen to the level last seen in 2014, before the sharp spike in deadly shootings and bomb attacks brought Sweden’s gang problems global attention. Why is lethal violence down and is it a dip or a declining trend?
What do the statistics show?
According to the latest statistics from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, the number of reported cases of lethal violence fell by more than a fifth from 121 in 2023 to 92 in 2023.
That is the lowest number of cases of lethal violence reported in Sweden since 2014.
In the graph below you can see the development in annual cases of lethal violence since 2002. (green = total, orange = men, magenta = women).
Graphic: Swedish Council for Crime Prevention
The biggest drop was in reports of deadly knife violence, which fell from 41 in 2023 to 25 in 2024, but the number of deadly shootings also fell, from 53 in 2023 to 45 in 2024.
In the graph below you can see the development in annual cases of lethal violence by weapon. (green = total, orange = guns, magenta = knives, blue=other method).
Graphic: Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention
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What is behind the decline?
Jan Lundbeck, a statistician at Brå, told The Local that the decline in 2024 had been exaggerated by the extremely high level of fatal violence, particularly against women and children, reported in 2023 and 2022.
This, he said, was due to the ongoing struggle between the Foxtrot gang led by Rawa Majid and the Rumba network led by his former accomplice Ismail Abdo.
“In 2022 and 2023 we had quite a big struggle between two opposing gangs which led to a lot of killings in the criminal milieu, but in 2024 that struggle had slowed down,” he said.
Oisín Cantwell, the legal columnist for the Aftonbladet newspaper, wrote in an article that it was “starting to look like a trend”, even if it was too early to say exactly why the level of deadly violence was in decline.
Neither the tougher penalties the government has brought in nor laws to increase police powers, such as stop-and-search zones, had he argued, had had any more than “the most marginal impact”.
He did not rule out, however, that increased police powers to do things like bug criminals without a warrant, would have an impact in future.
Lundbeck said police claimed to have become better at stopping gang killings before they happen.
“The police say that there are still lots of perpetrators, young people who want to commit [these crimes for money] and there are still a lot of people who are ordering homicides to get rid of other people,” he said.
“But at the same time, the police say they have been better at intervening before the murder occurs. So if we want this to continue into next year, the police will have to continue carrying out the work that they did in 2024, because if the police don’t make the same progress in the future, we could have a lot of killings again.”
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“That the police have got better is an important part of the explanation. The prisons are full of gang criminals,” Cantwell agreed. The police success rate in investigating gang killings has risen from 20 percent to 70 percent, he said.
He said that gang leaders may also have started to tire of the ceaseless violence and perhaps realised that it’s bad for business.