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Nothing ages as fast as debate books and nothing is more deadly than yesterday’s current reports.
When I read Lasse Wierup’s latest book on serious crime in Sweden, I wonder what it will look like in thirty years. The book will be out of libraries and can only be found at KB and university libraries, which are required to keep a copy. “Gangster Paradise” will gather dust in occasional antique shops.
How do you read? So you have the book in your hands? As a description of a parenthesis, as much as Lasse Wierup mentions the criminal gangs that emerged from the slums of industrialization more than a hundred years ago: immigrants from the countryside seeking a better future in the new big cities, families rich in children and overcrowded where the critical mass of young men without a permanent place in life and outside of social control formed socially dangerous leagues?
Or is the book a description of the beginning of Sweden’s decline?
There is no law in history.
Anyone who reads Wierup’s book in thirty years does not do so by chance. The reader will be a researcher or journalist, if there is one, and will try to understand what happened in our country in 2020.
Criminal journalism is an often underrated genre. It has never been pleasant and reporters rarely belong to the obviously respected, those who are invited to the roundtables. This may be because the genre has a wide variety, from referees sitting on the lap of police and prosecutors to journalists of the caliber of Lasse Wierup. (Possibly criminal journalism is about to get a boost thanks to Wierup’s journalism and Johanna Bäckström Lerneby’s acclaimed book “The Family.”)
All genders have the same distance between the best and the worst, there are many political reporters who also sit in the lap of politicians, but one of the reasons for the disgrace of criminal journalism is that in its worst forms it easily becomes elegant. while the political just becomes boring and harmless.
Political journalism often portrays society as a game, who takes whom in the formation of government, what is behind Scheme X, transfers here and tax cuts there.
It is the equivalent of the summer murder genre of criminal journalism. The reader rarely becomes wiser, learning nothing about what drives development.
That’s why the future comes Historians would benefit more from a report like Lasse Wierup’s than from numerous political descriptions. The reality is concrete. It is the reality in so-called vulnerable areas that is driving important parts of social development in Sweden by 2020. This is inevitable because 550,000 people in our country live in places where criminal gangs largely control and establish themselves.
More than half a million.
Wierup’s book is an exciting overview of how some of the leagues work. He has read thousands of pages of preliminary investigation protocols, hundreds of verdicts, endless investigations, conducted numerous interviews, carefully observed the debate in the Riksdag and the press, and mapped 183 mobsters in detail.
It is exciting and fascinating.
And terrifying. The police are often defenseless and forced to perform empty gestures like parking a bus in a square when another shooting has occurred, one of all these security-building measures that ceases after a few days when the alarm goes off elsewhere. Politicians groping. All these astonishingly mild trials and outrageous therapies for young gangsters who have not the slightest interest in becoming honest boys.
It is a social development that has been allowed to continue until it explodes not only in the suburbs but also in politics. Suddenly, there is no limit to all the hard work that must be taken on!
Melancholic? Yes. But in the end, Wierup shows with demographic and mathematical models that problems can be fought, it is not even very complicated. However, it requires that we be able to discuss reality as it is.
Of course i have one some objections. Lasse Wierup sometimes sounds more like a civil servant than a reporter. Is there no other word than “incapacitation”? Possibly the third accurate description of gang creation is too much.
There are comments on the sidelines. Anyone who wants to understand Sweden in 2020 has great pleasure in “Gangster Paradise”.
Read more DN book reviews
Read more: What is it like to grow up in a criminal clan?
