Swedish Police in Malmö Now Armed with Machine Guns to Take Back Control

As an antidote to the rampant criminality and attacks against law enforcement, at least two police stations in the city have chosen to ramp up security. Officers have been armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns.

“The police in Malmö are currently doing quite a lot of operations against professional criminals,” said Calle Persson, press officer for the police in southern Sweden. “We know from prior work of this kind that some criminals tend to carry out vengeance attacks. It’s also a statement in some way: we want to show who’s in charge.”

Samtliga polishus i Malmö bevakade av tungt beväpnad polis https://t.co/BNg3YgULRo pic.twitter.com/B5OBrW8Q2d — Sydsvenskan (@sydsvenskan) February 3, 2018

According to The Local Sweden, Rosengård, where a bomb was detonated outside of a police station, is among the 61 areas in the country that is defined as “vulnerable” and defined as “a geographically defined area characterized by a low socio-economic status where criminals have an impact on the local community”.

In 2016, according to data accumulated by Swedish newspapers Sydsvenskan and HD, Malmö was the city with the most murders per capita in all of Scandinavia.

Sydsvenskan writes: “In total, fatal violence in Sweden fell for a number of years in the early 2000s. The number of murders was well under 100 a year. But in 2015 the curve turned sharply upwards: 112 murders in the country.”

Last year, as SVT reported in November 2017, looked to become the worst year for shootings in a long time, according to Manne Gerell, a researcher in criminology at Malmö University.

“It is definitely a high level of lethal shootings in Malmö. In Western Europe there are few cities with the same level”, Manne Gerell told SVT.