00:00Is Sweden as unsafe as Trump says?
00:06Very unsafe, full of crime, completely different to how it used to be.
00:11These are some of the words that US President Donald Trump used to describe Sweden in a recent interview.
00:18So Sweden was known as the safest country in Europe, one of the safest countries in the world.
00:22Now it's known as a very unsafe, well, pretty unsafe country.
00:26It's not even believable. It's a whole different country.
00:29They're not terms that we usually hear used when talking about the Nordic countries.
00:33So how true are they? How safe is Sweden really, especially compared to the US?
00:38To answer this, we can look at several different metrics, such as the Global Peace Index,
00:43which measures a country's levels of safety and security, the conflicts it's involved in, and how militarised it is.
00:50Sweden ranks 35th out of 163 countries here, scoring 1.709.
00:56The closer to 1, the more peaceful and safe a country supposedly is.
01:01Compare this to the US, which came in 128th place and scored 2.443.
01:06Another way we can compare them is by taking numbers from Eurostat,
01:10which logged every EU member's homicide rates per 100,000 people,
01:14and the US National Center for Health Statistics, which did the same for the states.
01:19Now, clearly, these aren't the same data sets, so their methodologies are slightly different.
01:24But they can help us to compare safety levels between Sweden and the US.
01:28In 2023, Sweden's homicide rate came in at 1.15 per 100,000 people, up from 0.9 in 2014.
01:37So yes, you could say that it's become less safe during that time.
01:40Compared to the US, it's still safer than the safest state, though.
01:44New Hampshire's death rate is 1.9, according to the NCHS.
01:48The District of Columbia comes in at 33.1, far higher than Sweden, with all the other states in between.
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