Norway adopts Nordic model to identify gang violence hotspots
Norway is deploying the same methods Denmark and Sweden use to map vulnerable neighborhoods linked to gang violence and ethnic segregation. The move signals growing concern across Scandinavia about preventing social breakdown—and suggests policymakers now see neighborhood targeting as a core prevention strategy.
Originaltitel: Vulnerable Areas in Oslo – Toward “Swedish Conditions”?
<p>In the past decade, Sweden has experienced a large increase in gang violence, strongly linked to what is termed “vulnerable areas.” This has sparked concerns about vulnerable areas across the Nordic countries. A recurring public debate is how to prevent the occurrence of “Swedish conditions” and their implications for gang violence, and, more broadly, ethnic segregation. As a result, there has been an increased emphasis on analyzing the spatial separation of different social groups and geographical crime patterns.The Danish government annually publishes a list of vulnerable neighborhoods; in 2022, the list included 17 neighborhoods. Similarly, the Swedish police release a biannual list of vulnerable areas, with the most recent edition containing 61 areas. There are differences in how vulnerable areas are defined and identified between and within these countries. Currently, Norway lacks a national strategy for identifying vulnerable areas, but the City of Oslo and the Oslo police department have recently adopted similar approaches. In this study, we use methods applied in Denmark (Danish Government, 2022a) and Sweden (Guldåker et al., 2021) to identify vulnerable areas in Norway. By doing so, we identify the differences that exist between the two methods.As discussions regarding vulnerable areas often revolve around crime prevention, we also analyze differences in crime levels among the identified areas within Oslo municipality. This will further build on our understanding about the relationship between crime and vulnerability. We discuss the inclusion of reported crime and ethnicity as predictors of vulnerable areas, and how this might lead to misdirected (criminal) policy measures.We observe there is lower residential segregation in Norway – while it does not suffer from Swedish (or Danish) conditions, other studies have shown an increase in urban segregation in Norway, and it remains important to prevent further increases to avoid negative development of social problems, including crime.</p>