| ▲ | gjsman-1000 2 days ago |
| Sweden has also had an explosion of organized gang violence; carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga... https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-... |
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| ▲ | LtWorf 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I live in sweden. Police here is extremely incompetent and unwilling to do their jobs. They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished. They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed. Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare. |
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| ▲ | Llamamoe 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats. This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption. Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it? |
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| ▲ | rekoil 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Or just host their own actually end-to-end encrypted chat apps. | | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah sure, teenage gangs are totally going to do that... | | |
| ▲ | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I sense sarcasm, so apologies if my question is off base. Why does this seem unlikely to you? | | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 2 days ago | parent [-] | | People who join teenage gangs do not have enough computing knowledge to host their own end-to-end encrypted chat services. Surely that is obvious? | | |
| ▲ | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Surely that is obvious? It kinda is but I didn't want to make that assumption. That is what I had assumed, for what it's worth. (Actually, I figured it was either knowledge or resources.) It also helps for the reason to be given explicitly so others can weigh in with relevant arguments rather than one that refutes something you didn't mean. | |
| ▲ | happymellon 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Teenagers figure out how to hack locked down consoles, which are hostile to make money. All it will take is someone to make a fediverse chat that can be simply stuck on a Pi from a premade image, and automatically runs a script to update the DNS with their IP and the kids will do it. | |
| ▲ | Suzuran 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Someone will make it easier. All the stuff you use today used to be a lot harder and more complicated than it is now. People worked to take the difficulty off, usually because they wanted to do the same thing and the difficulty annoyed them. |
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| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > “Socioeconomic factors are what mostly constitute the risks of ending up in crime,” not ethnicity, says Felipe Estrada Dörner, a professor of criminology at
Stockholm University This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well. I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing : - increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts - a youth unemployment problem - housing price crunch |
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| ▲ | dariosalvi78 2 days ago | parent [-] | | socioeconomic factors and ethnicity are highly correlated. So Prof. Estrada Dörner is probably noting that there is no causation (foreigner -> becomes criminal) but the correlation is high and is due to many factors including segregation and latent racism, so maybe the causal factor is more like discrimination -> creates criminals. |
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| ▲ | rstuart4133 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thank you. For others this is the last para of the first link: > The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC. So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing. Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh. |
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| ▲ | hilios 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars No that is not ChatControl, that is just some Swedish thing. Chat Control would make it mandatory for servive providers to scan every single message in the EU for offending material and notify the authorities if anything is detected. It's blatant mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children. | |
| ▲ | ExoticPearTree 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Naive question, but what is the cause of youth violance? Or the increase in violance for that demographic? | | |
| ▲ | dariosalvi78 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | in Sweden it's segregation and social context. It mostly affects immigrants, mostly children of parents who came here for a better life. They find themselves in poor neighbourhoods, very bad schools, isolated and often discriminated, with no prospects for a "good life". Criminals (adult) know this and push a sort of cool gangsta narrative that some kids find appealing. Kids, mostly adolescents are recruited online, which is why Sweden seems so against encrypted chats, and are commissioned jobs, from selling drugs to executions. This is because kids are mostly impune, and they are easy to convince. Kids being kids, those jobs often end up in a mess. It's a dire state of affairs. Sweden is currently one of the most (if not the most?) violent country in Europe if you count gun shootings per capita [1]. The police is unprepared, has few legal means and resources. There are also few officers in general [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-... | |
| ▲ | defrost 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In large part, in Australia, the perception of increased youth crime is a result of increased attention to and policing of youth crime .. across the board things appear to be getting better in the aggregate: The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures youth crime across the country by collecting and aggregating police statistics from every state and territory.
Its data shows the number of youth offenders are lower for every state and territory compared with 2008-09.
The same thing can be seen when comparing the number of youth offenders per 100,000 people — the rate has gone down, although there has been a slight uptick in some states and territories since COVID pandemic.
At the same time, however: But some states, like Victoria, have recorded a significant rise in youth crime, with its agencies also highlighting the number of incidents involving young offenders — not just the number of youth offenders.
There's more to be said, some of which appears in (the source of the two quotes above):How Australia's states and territories are grappling with youth crime https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-31/australian-state-and-... Also: 'They've always been scapegoats': Behind Australia's crackdown on youth crime Are states like Queensland and Victoria really facing a youth crime "crisis"? Here's what criminologists, political experts and Indigenous advocates say.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australias-crackdown-on-... |
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| ▲ | ipaddr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | dogcow 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Or, more likely, we're seeing the result of a generation growing up glued to cell phone screens and crappy social media every waking moment from their youngest years? | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr a day ago | parent [-] | | We are quick to blame phones and social media. Previously it was tv. Before that comics and radio. The breakdown of the nuclear family. We ignore the food we put into our bodies, we include the medical waste going into our environment getting recycled back into food/water. We blindly take pills the doctor gives. We gladly take a needle where you need to sign a piece of paper saying you can't sue if anything goes wrong with this untested vaccine. We would never let any other drug/vaccine into the market without years of testing but this one is fine. You have to sign here because when something goes wrong we need to make sure it's your fault alone. |
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| ▲ | nickslaughter02 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | SiempreViernes 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The biggest factor is that the police simply suck at doing their real job but have worked hard at making sure the rank and file doesn't complain in public. | | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 2 days ago | parent [-] | | "never complain" is a rule in all sectors in sweden. Makes people feel isolated and makes them think nobody else is facing the same issue as them. |
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| ▲ | LtWorf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They accepted a lot of migration but then expected immigrants to be content with being extremely poor and with no way to improve their condition and got surprise picachu faces when they decided that crime was an appropriate way since no other way existed. |
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