> My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home

This whole 'golden age' of Sweden is just such a bunch of bs.

Take a look, for instance, at this article about a part of central Stockholm which is now extremely expensive real estate:

https://skarn.se/hans-marmbo/ (in Swedish)

I thoroughly recommend running the page through Google translate or DeepL for an insight into the reality of Stockholm just 50 years ago - it's a fascinating and horrific account of drug addicts and lowlifes brutally murdering each other in terrifying and depraved ways.

(DeepL translation:) "Prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts moved in next door to students and underpaid casual workers. Pickpocketing, knife fights and burglaries became commonplace, and neighbourhoods once considered stately could now have been lifted from a Dickens novel. In the press, the area was called the swamp..."

yeah, and that was literally front page news and was an incredibly unusual event.

Furthermore, Östermalm has always been a place full of somewhat disreputable people, even though it ended up a place where relatively rich people lived. Notice that the story you're talking about involves prostitutes and all sorts of deranged stuff.

These people may have been associates of the upper class, but there is a reason we Swedes have always despised the upper class.

> that was literally front page news and was an incredibly unusual event.

My point wasn't about the specific case (obviously multiple horrific murders are not a common occurrence), I meant the general milieu of drug addiction, law-breaking, prostitution; the disgustingly dirty slum conditions that people lived in - all of which was accompanied by police corruption and brutality.

Naturally none of this is popular to bring up in front of Swedes nowadays.

As I see that the downvote of my Swedish-negative comments speaks volumes about how much you guys value freedom of expression.

I don't have enough comments to be able to downvote, so it's not me and it's far from certain that it's a Swede. This is a forum very few people from here frequent.

Citing statistics would be a lot more convincing than basing an argument around a single news story. I was under the impression that crime statistics show a deterioration. Is that not the case? (not a downvoter, btw, but maybe that's what they're objecting to)

Yes, there's absolutely a deterioration.

[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-c... a graph from Wikipedia showing some violent crimes increasing, but the change is more than just the numbers, and the numbers could now be underestimates because trust in police etc. has dropped.

The social trust that existed even with strangers and for which there was good reason is largely gone.

Do you mean when she wasn't home? Or is it customary to lock you're home even when you're home now?

Yes, these days we lock our homes even when we're home.

for what its worth im in America (where crime is way way higher) and i don't consider that normal. probably a cultural thing.

Interesting

Can someone enter your house without using any force or tools?

I'm from a very hick part of America and I know probably half a dozen people who used a phrase something like "unlocked doored, locked and loaded shotgun." Not exactly condoning that phrase, but the thief in hillbilly parts of America is gonna have to use force eventually if they want to steal from an occupied home whether it is locked or not.

I went into my uncle’s unlocked house and found myself staring down the barrel of his roommate’s gun. People don’t tend to go into occupied houses in the US as there is a very real risk of getting shot.

Not here in Sweden.

RC2 (resistance class 2) is to resist attacks with hammers, wedges and screwdrivers for three minutes. RC3 is to resist five minutes of crowbar attack RC4 is to resist power tools for 10 minutes

They're often made largely out of steel. I think RC3 is most common, but that RC4 is very rare.

i guess? i find most people knock like normal though. i have a good few guns though so i'm fully capable of defending myself. i never figured a residential grade lock was much good against someone anyway and if i'm right there it's not like someone can sneak in. i might be more worried if i was a small guy or a woman but i've never had a problem.

Where do you live? America is not uniformly high in crime. When I lived in NYC, people absolutely did lock their doors when at home. There was good reason for it too. I suspect other urban areas are similar.

I don't even do that in SF, the great crime capital of the world.

I used to think this about Sweden but literature of that time does not describe a society like that. Literature is often reflective of the world it is in.

Not like 2001 : A Space Odyssey is about what the world is like in 2001 but it sort of reflects the assumptions of the world at that time. For instance, there are no smartphones in that world.

Anyway, Swedish contemporary literature of that time doesn't tell such a picture which makes me think this is more a factor of an individual experience rather than what that society was like.

As someone who lived partially in this era and had parents who very ḿuch lived in this era, you're wrong.

Take one of the Agaton Sax books, a detective story. It's completely inconceivable in our present society.

I haven't read those. What about those books are inconceivable?

The general attitude in Byköping, the manner in which the villains behave and the inherent foreignness of Agaton Sax's adversaries.

I bought the first book. Let me have a look.

Where I grew up in the mid-Atlantic US people would commonly not lock their homes or cars. Near zero murder rate and home burglaries were exceptionally rare.

That's not an uncommon story in the US (maybe it is today), but you do have to be outside of cities.

Most people I know in the Swedish countryside still don't look any of their doors.

We never lock our door in Canada now