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In March 2017, British Brexit supporter and former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage was investigated by the United Kingdom's broadcasting standards authority Ofcom for a grossly-misleading comment he made on his radio show which quickly went viral: Farage claimed, falsely, that the Swedish city of Malmö was Europe's rape capital, thanks to the country's welcoming a large number of asylum seekers in 2015. The claim made by Farage on 20 February 2017 was roundly criticized and debunked. But on 14 September 2017, Farage doubled down, this time citing conspiracy web site InfoWars to again push the narrative that Sweden is so overwhelmed with rape cases committed by migrants that the police have given up on investigating them: We investigated the claim by Farage that police in Sweden are no longer investigating rape cases and the claim made by InfoWars that the 2015 migrant crisis caused the rate of sexual assaults in Sweden to double. CLAIM: Sexual assault in Sweden has doubled because of newly-arrived asylum seekers. False. InfoWars, which is run by infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pushes stories not for their accuracy but for their ability to go viral by riling up readers with outlandish narratives about big-government, Illuminati, or Jewish power grabs. InfoWars also traffics heavily in fearmongering about asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. The InfoWars article cited by Farage was written by editor-at-large and YouTube ranter Paul Joseph Watson, and bears the headline Swedish Police 'cannot cope' with huge numbers of rapes since migrants arrived. Watson reports: InfoWar's main source for the story is Joakim Lamotte, a Swedish vlogger who filmed himself purportedly talking to a police investigator in Stenungsund, a city north of Gothenburg. (We reached out to Lamotte with questions about this exchange and got no response.) In his video, which he posted to his official Facebook page, Lamotte asks the investigator why police haven't yet apprehended the boy suspected of raping a 12-year-old girl in Stenungsund, even though the crime happened in July 2017. The investigator tells him police do not have have enough staffing to cope with the crime because of other serious cases that have been given priority. Neither Lamotte nor the investigator make mention of migrants, immigrants, refugees, or even expats, and the InfoWars article doesn't provide any evidence to support the leap from a police backlog to migrants. In fact, the article negates its own premise. Watson reports, Sex crimes in the country have doubled since 2012 — but the influx of 163,000 migrants seeking asylum in Sweden didn't even begin until late summer 2015. And although it's true that reported sexual assaults doubled from 2012 to 2015, crime researchers have attributed the increase to the broadening of laws in Sweden in terms of what is considered rape. According to a study by Sweden's National Council Council for Crime Prevention: CLAIM: Police are no longer investigating rape cases because they're overwhelmed with serious crime. Mostly false. The video created by Lamotte on 31 August 2017 went viral, resulting in news media coverage of rape cases that were being handled slowly by police. For example Radio Sweden reported: Nils Norling, spokesman for Swedish police in the southern region, explained in an e-mail that resources are taxed by two things: an increased demand for serious crime investigations in the southern region, and also a shortage of skilled investigators, in part because the bar for becoming one is set very high: Norling also told us that there was an increase in reported rapes in 2016 compared to 2015, but added it was unclear whether this was due to an actual increase in rape or increased reporting of the crimes. He added that rape in Sweden is defined more broadly than in many other countries (for example, under U.S. federal law, rape includes penetration, whereas in Sweden it does not). But most importantly, Norling says bluntly: He also said it's false to say police are no longer investigating rape — in the southern police region, investigators currently have 317 open rape cases, and in 250 of those cases, they have identified a suspect. Norling told us that there's no overall increase in violent crime in Sweden, but the nature of recent crimes have been uniquely challenging for investigators: This falls in line with what we reported when we traveled to Sweden in March 2017 to investigate claims by Farage and other far-right aspiring media personalities that there is rampant crime, thanks entirely (according to them) to the country's acceptance of a large number of asylum seekers in 2015. We were told by authorities and researchers that while there is not an increase in violent crime in the country, there is a new type of crime akin to street violence seen in impoverished neighborhoods almost anywhere in the world — gang-type crime with associated drug offenses and retaliatory gun violence. During our visit we interviewed Erik Jansåker, a police chief in Malmö’s southern areas, who explained that there had been a spate of tit-for-tat shootings — although the cohort of migrants who arrived in 2015 are not the ones involved. As we reported in March 2017: Chief Jansåker told us at the time that his investigators were handling 14 homicides — a larger number than usual and that had subsequently overwhelmed them, thus pushing them to seek assistance from other regions. However, the situation in Sweden is not the one presented by Farage and InfoWars. Instead, as Palmkvist, the crime reporter, put it succinctly in an email to us, the bottom line is that Police fucked up big time in at least one rape case, and, police say that there generally are too few police officers around. Farage, he points out, quotes InfoWars, which takes a specific issue and generalizes it to suddenly claim that 'rapes have skyrocketed' since migrants started arriving. Meanwhile InfoWars, as they are wont to do, sources obviously-slanted anti-Muslim web sites (like MuslimStatistics.WordPress.com) for evidence. Police in Sweden are short on investigators with the credentials necessary to work serious crime cases, and have thus been forced to prioritize murder and attempted-murder investigations amid a new pattern of gun violence in a community that does not readily cooperate with police. However police have not stopped investigating rape, as Farage claimed, nor is there a new, massive wave of rapes committed by migrants who arrived in Sweden starting in 2015.
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