– Based on our analysis, we have seen that there is little to no link between the proportion of immigrants in a municipality and reported violent crime, said Amber Beckley, associate professor of criminology and senior lecturer at Örebro University.
The study, conducted by criminologists at five Swedish universities, claims to have compared the 20 municipalities in Sweden with the highest increase in violent crime between 2000 and 2020 with the 20 municipalities with the least negative trend, controlling for the number of immigrants living in these 40 municipalities.
– Most violent crime in a municipality can be explained by other factors, such as the number of people working and education, Beckley further argues in an interview with Swedish public radio SR.
It should be noted that the researchers only looked at people who had immigrated to Sweden and obtained Swedish residence permits or citizenship – not asylum seekers or children of immigrants. According to previous studies, second-generation immigrants have been identified as a group with the highest proportion of criminal suspects.
Violent crime increased in all municipalities
The main author of the report, which has received a lot of attention in the establishment media, is the well-known left-wing activist criminologist Jerzy Sarnecki, and Amber Beckley, who is the report’s second author, also admits to Samnytt that violent crime has increased in almost all of the municipalities analyzed.
– Almost all have increased. There was almost no municipality in these twenty years where violent crime decreased.
– What we have shown was that the proportion of immigrants in the municipalities with the largest increase in violent crime was not that different from the proportion in the municipalities with the smallest increase… The proportion of immigrants does not explain violent crime in a municipality, and it cannot explain the increase in the twenty municipalities, she concludes.
