There’s a concerning proclivity amongst xenophobes to use tortured statistics as means to unduly smear immigration. Even more concerning to see it take hold in highly upvoted comments here.

That chart is using data from 2021, while the gang crisis in Sweden began escalating in 2022.

So quite a while after the peak in immigration in the mid/late 2010s.

Sweden murder rate over time, it trends down until the mid 2010s: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/murder-homi...

That chart shows a steady rate up to 2005, a decline from 2005-2012 and then a rise back to the previous level between 2012 and 2015, and steady at the previous level since then. The big spike in Syrian immigration started around 2015-2016. Based on these numbers, I’d say these two factors (immigration and murder) appear to be unrelated.

You can't truly say it happened in 2012 because there is noise in the graph. Even when the long term trends are flat it goes up and down. It definitely happened _around_ the mid 2010s.

Here is Finland: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FIN/finland/murder-hom...

And here is Norway: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NOR/norway/murder-homi...

They do not see this rise.

> They do not see this rise.

Finland also has a markedly higher murder rate to start with (for whatever reason), and it absolutely shows a distinct rise in the last few years – much more so than Sweden in fact.

Norway is indeed more stable. However, Norway also accepted significant number of migration. Although it's hard to tell how much exactly because of different definitions, it seems roughly half as much as Sweden (adjusted for population), which is less but not nothing.

And in a quick check Finland has seen even less migration than Norway.

So you will need to explain why Norway sees no rise in spite of migration, and Finland sees a rise in spite of less migration.

And sure, I'm willing to accept that migration is a factor in Sweden. Although I can't tell you how exactly since I'm not familiar enough with the nuances in Sweden. But this "argumentum ad charts" you're making that migration somehow automatically leads to crime is complete bollocks.

I mean there’s just no rise at all after 2015. It just goes back to the long term average. If anything I’d be looking for what happened in 2005 to reduce the murder rate, that seems to be the real story of this graph. But realistically it’s probably all just noise.

Are we looking at the same chart like? Because that chart shows it's been roughly steady since 1990, with some peaks up and some peaks down: 1991 was an outlier upwards, 2012 an outlier downwards, but overall: roughly stable. This kind of variation is to be expected since in absolute numbers it's a relatively small number of people.

It’s clearly falling and then rising. Compare to Finland which has a similar fall, but continues to fall instead of rise.

> Compare to Finland which has a similar fall, but continues to fall instead of rise.

Just minutes ago in another comment you yourself posted a link which clearly and markedly shows that Finland has seen a marked and steep rise in the last few years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339299

According to [1] it hasn't changed much in 2022. 2023 isn't finished yet, so I don't know about that.

And my main point was that "gun violence" showing near zero for some countries shouldn't absolutely not be taken as "near zero crime" or "near zero homicide".

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/533917/sweden-number-of-...

When discussing a topic like gang violence why would you focus on the general societal homicide rate unless gang homicide's execution mirrored that of the society at large? The only useful attribute of your approach seems to be that it downplays the severity of what's being measured at a glance. The ranked approach is also strange considering that the obvious point of interest for most people would be whether the gang related murder rates in the countries that accepted refugees trended upwards or downwards from their past values within those regions. Comparing countries to each other instead of comparing them against their historical selves is just sleight of hand to excuse real human suffering as "exaggerated".

The problem is that "gang homicide" is not a statistic that is generally recorded, and is difficult and error prone to record.

The most relevant figures would be homicide rate by perpetrator country of origin. Allegedly, 85% of shooting suspects are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants [0].

But reliable figures are hard to come by, partly because if scientists, even accidentally, find that, e.g., most rapes are committed by immigrants, they get prosecuted (eventually the charges were dropped, because they couldn't prove "bad intentions", negligence, or carelessness) [1,2,3,4].

The other reason is that, though Sweden used to collect data about criminal's ethnic background, they stopped I think in 2005 [5]. Though it seems they've resumed - in searching for sources for this post, I found https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/11/sweden-finally-publishe...

[0] https://www.thefp.com/p/two-bombings-in-one-night-thats-norm...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20961790.2020.1...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

[3] https://www.opindia.com/2021/11/sweden-lund-university-resea...

[4] https://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2023/06/aklagare-...

[5] https://www.thelocal.se/20180508/why-sweden-doesnt-keep-stat...

Trends are what matters. Murder rates in Hungary and Slovakia have been trending down for quite some time, while Sweden's are rising.