Sweden spent years hemorrhaging credibility as a poster child for what critics call suicidal empathy — a nation so committed to open borders that its authorities didn’t even bother tracking bombings until 2018. Now, according to a new report in the Financial Times, the country is delivering one of the bluntest real-world tests of a policy American voters are still fighting over: deport the criminals, watch crime fall.
Writing in American Thinker, retired police officer Mike McDaniel argues that the numbers coming out of Sweden are exactly what his years on the job taught him to expect. A tiny handful of prolific offenders — often fewer than ten — are responsible for most felonies in any given area. Take them off the street, and the crime rate doesn’t tick down gently. It collapses.
“Take these small bands of crooks out of circulation, and the number of their crimes in those areas immediately, dramatically plummets,” McDaniel writes, noting that the corollary is that identifying and rolling the offenders on each other is the hard part — and that positive results also depend on prosecutors willing to prosecute and judges willing to keep criminals locked up.
Grenades in the streets
Sweden’s baseline was grim. Citing PJ Media’s Stephen Green, McDaniel notes that hand grenade attacks had become a routine feature of Swedish life in certain neighborhoods — an almost unthinkable development in a country once better known for saunas and spas than for gangland warfare.
The escalation was steep. By the summer of 2022, Sweden had recorded 361 shootings, 62 shooting deaths, and 90 bombings, according to figures relayed in the piece. The migrant-gang problem grew so fast that Swedish authorities apparently didn’t begin keeping national bombing statistics until 2018 — a detail McDaniel latches onto as evidence of how thoroughly the country had looked away.
That summer, conservative leader Ulf Kristersson — then a member of the Riksdag — made his position plain: “If you commit such crimes in Sweden and are not a Swedish citizen, you should be thrown out of the country.” Even the governing Social Democrats, long seen as soft on crime, promised tougher measures by election day. It wasn’t enough to keep Kristersson from assembling a coalition large enough to take power.
What changed
Once in office, Kristersson’s government did several things at once, per the piece: it funded the police more generously, expanded wiretapping, and focused specifically on disrupting gang recruitment of young people. Deportation was paired with enforcement.
The results, as reported by the Financial Times on Monday, were striking. Shootings are down 80 percent from their 2022 peak. Kristersson has also cut the number of asylum seekers to its lowest level in four decades. Earlier this year, one Swedish newspaper ran a headline that would have been absurd a few years prior: “No shootings in May.”
“The fact that you have headlines saying no shootings at all this month: it says something,” Kristersson told the FT.
McDaniel’s takeaway is blunt: sending foreign criminals home turns out to be just as effective as locking up homegrown ones. The policy debate that American politicians treat as hypothetical has, in his framing, already been run in a Scandinavian laboratory.
The Churchill problem
But Sweden isn’t finished. The country holds another national election on Sunday, and the Social Democrats — the party that governed through the years when grenades became a fact of life — could return to power.
Mattias Karlsson, the chief ideologue of the nationalist Sweden Democrats, described the risk to the FT as the “Churchill effect.” Winston Churchill was indispensable to Britain’s survival in World War II, then was voted out before the fighting had fully ended. The forces that would have lost the war, McDaniel writes, wormed their way back in.
That parallel is doing a lot of work in the piece. The question McDaniel poses is whether Swedish voters, having all but won the fight against gang violence, will now dismiss the man who led it — and hand power back to the coalition they rejected four years ago.
An American midterm lesson?
McDaniel, a USAF veteran, firearm instructor, and longtime blogger, doesn’t hide his view. The Swedish episode, he writes, offers “a lesson there for our midterms and beyond” — an argument aimed squarely at American voters weighing crime and immigration policy in the months ahead.
It’s worth being precise about what the source material does and doesn’t claim. The 80 percent decline in shootings and the four-decade asylum low are attributed to the Financial Times, not to independent verification by the author. The causal story — deportation and enforcement driving the drop — is the interpretation McDaniel and the FT’s reporting advance; Sweden also expanded policing, surveillance, and youth-recruitment disruption, as the piece itself acknowledges. And whether voters reward the coalition that produced those results remains genuinely unknown until Sunday’s ballots are counted.
What is clear is that the Swedish case has moved from think-piece hypothetical to concrete data point. For Americans arguing over deportation policy, the Nordic experiment now sits on the table — with an 80 percent number attached to it, and an election two days away that will determine whether the policy survives its own architect.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/sweden-discovers-deporting-immigrant-gangsters-reduces-crime/