Vasvija Ibrahimi, 23, a temporary worker in a retirement home, didn't mince her words. "It's a disaster," she said of the Hageby district where she grew up and still lives, with her one-year-old daughter, in Norrköping, a former industrial city of 145,000 residents, 160 kilometers south of Stockholm. As a child, Ibrahimi often hung out outside, between the blocks of apartments built in the 1960s along the tramway. There was no danger. Then everything changed: "For the last two years, it's been non-stop: fights, explosions, shootings."

On the night of June 2-3, two men were shot dead in an apartment a few hundred meters from her home. A man in his twenties was arrested. According to the police, this latest incident is linked to organized crime, which no longer seems to spare any city in Sweden. In 2023, 57 people died in shootings. Since the beginning of 2024, fights between rival gangs have already claimed some 20 lives.

In Norrköping alone, the head of the local police Frida Braf reports "25 serious offenses" in the first half of the year, as many as in 2023. "We're dealing with an increasingly complex phenomenon, with crimes committed by minors, mobile crime moving nationally and internationally, and different methods, including shootings and detonations," said Braf.

Following the double murder in Hageby at the beginning of June, the national police force decided to test a law that came into force on April 25, authorizing law enforcement officers to search people and vehicles in a predefined "security zone" for two weeks only, without a warrant or any probable cause, for the first time. Inspired by Denmark, this measure is one of the new elements in the rapidly expanding repressive plan carried out by the right-wing coalition, backed by the far right, which has been in power since October 2022.

Preventive wire-tapping

This measure may be controversial, but the residents of Hageby, exasperated by the violence, support it. "I don't know if it's working, but it's been a lot quieter these last few days," said Ibrahimi. Pernilla Segervall, who works in the pastry shop at the Mirum shopping center in the heart of the neighborhood, agreed. Even if she finds it "tragic that it has come to this," "there are no other solutions," she said, recalling that on March 4, a shooting broke out in the mall, leaving one person wounded.

With long braids and diamond earrings, Stone Zola, 18, is more wary. He has already been strip-searched twice, even before the neighborhood was declared a security zone. "I was on my way home from football practice," he said. "The first time, the police said they'd seen me shooting off fireworks. The second time, they thought they saw me on a stolen motorcycle. Some of my father's friends witnessed the scene. Since then, they're convinced I'm a criminal." Before the law was passed, several organizations warned against the risks of racial profiling.

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