Loyalty Traveler

Comments

1. The “dangers” of Malmo are blown out of proportion and overhyped, exciting as they are. Yes, there were indeed two explosions by closed restaurants and clubs within a ten minute walk away from Malmo C station — no actual grenades involved — this year, but those fire bomb efforts were almost certainly related to gang conflicts and happened when the venues were closed and empty of people. I strongly suspect they involved property-related disputes with gang-related business people in the questionable nightlife scene in southern Sweden.

   The vast majority of the illegal weapons (grenades included) in Malmo come into Malmo from Copenhagen and are also found in Copenhagen; the armed gangs in Copenhagen are not only in possession of the same kind of weapons and explosives as in Malmo, they probably have them in larger numbers in and around Copenhagen than in and around Malmo since Copenhagen is the main drug and weapons distribution channel into Sweden and the upstream /wholesale distributor has a greater financial resources in drug and weapons dealings than the less resourceful fish downstream that are stuck in a relatively smaller market who and are stuck fighting with each other for the scraps. The Danish gangs have been expanding their ties and turf into Sweden.

   I go out and about a lot at night too in Malmo, and the city is very safe for all but those who are in gangs, those closely associated with gang members or those who live in the gang-infested neighborhoods that are nowhere near where you would happen to go in Malmo unless making a real effort to go out of your way to see those areas — as I do at times.

   From personal experience, I can say that even the worst neighborhoods in Malmo seem to be way less hazardous to my health than walking out the door from $450+/night hotels in Washington, DC, Miami, or LA or even Copenhagen at 9pm on Saturday nights.

   And if security is the concern, I would say the risk of a terrorist attack at a Copenhagen tourist spot (such as at a hotel) is far higher than the risk of a terrorist attack in Malmo at places frequented by tourists visiting Malmo. In other words, if you want to be a lower profile target for terrorists, choose to stay in Malmo instead of Copenhagen. 😉 But seriously, avoid neither place.

   Malmo is one of the most exciting cities in Scandinavia, especially for young people, for reasons that have zippo to do with crime.

   A lot of the press and select elements of society near and far love to bash Malmo. Malmo really isn’t as bad as its detractors want to make it out to be. If it were so bad, then they need to explain why the Malmo area is one of the very few areas in Sweden where housing prices went up and outperformed nearly all the rest of Sweden (and Scandinavia) in recent years while they even fell in Stockholm and Gothenburg.

2. @GUWonder – The only reason I am even aware of bombings in Malmo is from my first trip in 2015 when I was sitting at Clarion Collection Hotel Temperance and reading about places I had seen in the city after walking around for hours. News stories came up on Google News for local Malmo news and I noticed a story about high gang activity.

   That is far removed from the walking experiences I had when touring the city. Love the farmers markets on the city squares, parks, painted murals, eating at Indian food restaurants and simply hanging out around the people of Malmo.

3. Some years back when I first started to use Malmo as a frequent base for CPH assignments and was getting my feet really wet in the area, there was to be a swim
   meet in a part of Malmo to which I had never been and that was definitely out of the way without a car/taxi. This place I was going to for a swim meet was apparently one of the worst crime-infested neighborhoods in all of Sweden, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t even get the sense of it being such a “highly vulnerable” area from wandering around that area during the day and early evening hours that week on breaks or when coming and going to the meet. The neighborhood felt like some parts of Queens or Brooklyn but more relaxed, way better maintained residential blocks and playgrounds, and with the parking lots of the mid-rise apartment buildings only full of relatively good looking cars and a high ratio of contemporary model BMWs, Mercedes, Audis and Volvos in perfect cosmetic shape at least. The only thing that struck me as unusual about the area was that the neighborhood square with a grocery store and some shops and restaurants felt more like a retirement community would feel like if it was in Baghdad in the 1980s. But it was Sweden 30 years later yet didn’t feel like it.

   What should have given it away as a high crime area was this: when we were trying to use the locker room showers at the swim meet, we encountered a bunch of tweenagers — presumably using their free/subsidized community pool season passes — who were definitely not there to compete. They were sitting on the floor under the running showers and talking to each other for 15+ minutes while refusing to listen to any of the adults telling them that they and the other kids needed the showers so could they please hurry up and not occupy all the showers like they were. The insolent tweenagers were trying to act all tough around their friends doing the same in the showers and just disrespectful in various ways. We eventually got them to vacate some of the showers, but it required calling the pool staff to threaten them with calling the ordinance police. Little gangsters in the making, given their behavior when without any proper adult supervision and engagement nearby. The tweenagers doing the obnoxious shower occupation were predominantly (but far from exclusively) the children of immigrants from beyond Europe, but I doubt that their parents would encourage this kind of disrespectful behavior either if they knew about it.

   My Swedish relatives, some of whom are in the Swedish police or other government security services, keep telling me about how dangerous Malmo is and ask if I wasn’t scared when in the “highly vulnerable” areas. And yet I know they won’t hesitate to go to big cities in Florida, California, Louisiana or Mexico and do so without considering crime rates. Many a business on the internet is built on engaging internet users, and one way to engage users and is to try to heighten fear. In the newspaper business it was: “If it bleeds it leads.” But in Malmo, if it explodes it still leads even when it doesn’t bleed.