Places with persistently high levels of crime, hot spots, are an important object of study. To some extent, the high levels of crime at such hot spots are likely to be related to flows of people. City center locations with large flows of people are quite often also hot spots, e.g., hot spots for pick pocketing at a central train station, or hot spots for assault in the nightlife district. This can be related to crime pattern theory, or to the routine activity perspective, which both suggest that flows of people can affect crime. The present study attempts to explore and quantify whether there are differences in the association between flows of people and crime for different crime types. The analysis considers locations with high crime counts for six crime types in the city of Malmö, Sweden. For each crime type, hot spots are identified and mapped, and in order to explore whether, or how, these are related to flows of people, the crime levels are then analyzed in relation to the number of people who boarded a local bus (N = 33,134,198) nearby. The paper shows that all six crime types are associated with flows of people, although less so for arson and vandalism. This is hypothesized to be due to the relatively constant target availability for these crimes as opposed to the other crime types studied.

Gun violence is a serious issue in many countries across the globe. It has been shown that there is an elevated risk for a further shooting nearby within a short time span of a shooting incident, so-called near-repeat patterning. The present study presents new evidence on near-repeat patterning in Sweden, with a focus on neighbourhoods which the police have labelled as ‘vulnerable’ – deprived neighbourhoods where criminal networks have a large impact on local communities. Such neighbourhoods tend to have open drug markets, and to have high levels of gun violence. The present paper analyses the association of open drug markets and vulnerable neighbourhoods with gun violence and near-repeat patterning of gun violence in two Swedish cities. Our findings suggest that gun violence is strongly concentrated on open drug markets in vulnerable neighbourhoods, and that those locations in addition exhibit high risks for repeat shootings after an initial shooting event. We propose that the police can use this knowledge to improve practices to prevent or disrupt gun violence.

Children are nested in families, and families are nested within communities (e.g. neighbourhoods). This implies that the behaviour of both children and their parents is influenced by external and contextual factors. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between parental monitoring and neighbourhood disorder and collective efficacy from the perspective of the adolescent and to investigate how perceived monitoring and neighbourhood characteristics were related to and interact in predicting adolescent offending. The characteristics of the adolescent's neighbourhoods were assessed using two different data sources: adolescents' own perceptions and an independent, aggregated measure from a community survey. The analyses showed that the adolescents' perceptions of neighbourhood level of disorder and collective efficacy were associated with both adolescent-perceived parental monitoring and adolescent offending, while the corresponding measures from the community survey were not. As regards the prediction of offending, adolescent-perceived parental monitoring is the most important predictor. Neither collective efficacy nor disorder appear to interact with parental monitoring in explaining adolescent offending. Future research would contribute to the field by examining the effect and interaction between the study variables in a sample with younger adolescents as well as by including parents' perceptions. As to practical implications, our results indicate that families living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may benefit from targeted support aimed at handling negative neighbourhood influences.

Police mobilisation is a first step in the judicial process and an important source of information on offending. Whether victims mobilise police is affected by their assessment of its utility. Victims who are criminals, such as drug dealers, are known to face a different cost–benefit scenario than law-abiding persons. Dutch ‘coffeeshops’ are a unique type of dealer. They operate in a grey area, allowed by the government to sell a prohibited drug, cannabis, so long as they comply with a set of regulations. Little is known about their mobilisation of police in response to victimisation, including how it is affected by the rules governing their business. We explore this issue with qualitative data collected from personnel of 50 coffeeshops in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We analyse how they think about the potential benefits and costs of asking the police for help post victimisation. In many ways, their thought process is similar to that of most any victim, but they also consider the potential negative ramifications of inviting police to their door. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research, regulation and drug control broadly, and coffeeshops specifically.

This register-based study from Sweden examines mortality risks among young male victims of violence. In total, 87,22 l men aged 18-24 years who spent at least one night in inpatient care after exposure to violence in the years 1992-2005 were compared with 78,702 age-matched men from the general population. Cox regressions showed that men exposed to violence had a >3 times higher risk of all-cause mortality, a >4 times higher risk of suicide, and about a 20 times higher risk of death from later violence. The risk of suicide remained stable during the follow-up, and the risk of all-cause mortality and death from later violence decreased.

BACKGROUND: Illicit drugs are increasingly sold on cryptomarkets and on social media. Buyers and sellers perceive these online transactions as less risky than conventional street-level exchanges. Following the Risks & Prices framework, law enforcement is the largest cost component of illicit drug distribution. We examine whether prices on cryptomarkets are lower than prices on social media and prices reported by law enforcement on primarily offline markets.

METHODS: Data consists of online advertisements for illicit drugs in Sweden in 2018, scraped from the cryptomarket Flugsvamp 2.0 (n = 826) and collected with digital ethnography on Facebook (n = 446). Observations are advertisements for herbal cannabis (n = 421), cannabis resin, hash (n = 594), and cocaine (n = 257) from 156 sellers. Prices are compared with estimates from Swedish police districts (n = 53). Three multilevel linear regression models are estimated, one for each drug type, comparing price levels and discount elasticities for each platform and between sellers on each platform.

RESULTS: Price levels are similar on the two online platforms, but cocaine is slightly more expensive on social media. There are quantity discounts for all three drug types on both platforms with coefficients between -0.10 and -0.21. Despite the higher competition between sellers on cryptomarkets, prices are not lower compared to social media. Online price levels for hash and cocaine are similar to those reported by police at the 1 g level.

CONCLUSION: Mean prices and quantity discounts are similar in the two online markets. This provides support for the notion that research on cryptomarkets can also inform drug market analysis in a broader sense. Online advertisements for drugs constitute a new detailed transaction-level data source for supply-side price information for research.

In this study, we examine differences in alcohol drinking between first- and second-generation non-European immigrant and native-Swedish adolescents. We also examine whether parental and peer attitudes toward alcohol are associated with the acculturation of drinking habits among adolescents with an immigrant background. The study is cross-sectional and based on a school survey conducted in 2016–2019 in eight municipalities in southern Sweden. The sample consists of 3743 adolescents in year 9 of compulsory education, aged 14–15 years, of which 538 (14.4%) had a non-European immigrant background. Non-European immigrant adolescents reported significantly lower levels of drinking than native-Swedish adolescents. Second-generation immigrants reported a higher level of consumption than first-generation immigrants, and among first-generation adolescents, drinking was more prevalent the longer the adolescents had resided in Sweden, which suggests acculturation of drinking habits. This acculturation is mainly related to changes in peer attitudes toward alcohol. Immigrant adolescents with a longer stay in Sweden reported having friends with more positive attitudes toward alcohol. Among first-generation immigrants, drinking was more common among boys than girls. These differences were primarily found among immigrant adolescents with a relatively short period of residence in Sweden, which suggests that acculturation occurs more quickly among boys than among girls.

The overall aim of this study is to fill a knowledge gap regarding misogynistic hate crimes, since only one previous study has focused on victims’ experiences. Drawing from a sample of 1,767 female students, the results show that women with experiences of misogynistic hate crimes are more likely to be subjected to sexual harassment, repeat victimization, and to have been targeted by strangers. They consistently report higher levels of fear of crime by comparison with both non-bias victims and non-victims. Finally, the results support the thesis that misogynistic hate crime, like other forms of hate crime, has a message effect.

In this article we examine whether different agents of socialization—family, school, and peers—are differentially associated with offending among different immigrant groups. Our expectation is to find that the association between delinquent friends and offending is stronger for first- and second-generation immigrants than for youths of native Swedish background. We use data from four nationally representative self-report studies of 21,504 adolescents with an average age of 15 years in Sweden. The results show that both first- and second-generation immigrants report committing more offenses than natives. The association is rather weak and the two predictors account for only a marginal amount of the variance in total offending. The results also show that the association between delinquent friends and offending is stronger for both first- and second-generation immigrants than for natives.

Criticism is commonly directed at research based on lifestyle-exposure theory and routine activity theory for the use of imprecise measures. To examine this issue further, this systematic review maps activities used as indicators of lifestyle and routine activities in studies on direct-contact crime among young individuals (mean age of 24 or younger). The results indicate that a broad range of activities are used as measures of lifestyle and routine activities in the 101 included studies. Studies on victimization often use illegal activities and substance use as measures of lifestyle or routine activities while studies on offending mainly rely on measures of unstructured and peer-oriented leisure activities. Overall, most studies seem more concerned with specific activities rather than routines or lifestyles.