Vulnerable to Riots? Stigma and community unrest in Swedish neighborhoods
Author(s): Juta Kawalerowicz, Jeffrey Mitchell
Friday 16 | 11:20-11:40
Room: TP53
Session: Spatial Marking, Neighborhood Stigma, and Neighborhood Inequality
In 2015 the Swedish police began a program to classify neighborhoods they deemed to be of low socio-economic status where crime had an impact on the community. The goal of the ‘vulnerable areas’ program is to identify areas that should be targeted for crime prevention interventions, and increased police presence, in an effort to reduce crime. However, the areas that received a designation have been subject to an enormous amount of negative attention that has the potential to carry powerful stigmatizing effects which can erode trust in the police and foment community unrest. In the spring of 2022, several Swedish neighborhoods experienced riots, but the reasons for why the rioting was worse in some areas than in others is not yet well understood. Since rioting constitutes a special class of criminal activity which often signals a breakdown of trust in state authorities it is an ideal outcome measure to assess the stigmatizing effects of the program because it is an indicator of both crime and a break down in social cohesion, something that is often overlooked in the social cohesion literature focusing on survey data.
This study analyses how neighborhoods on the list of vulnerable areas differ in terms of their participation in the urban unrest from other socio-economically deprived neighborhoods that had similar characteristics but were not on the list. We will match geolocated instances of riots that occurred during the unrest in 2022, which include data on severity of the unrest, with maps of the vulnerable areas designations provided by the Swedish police and population data from the Swedish registers to analyze this question. The results of this paper will provide valuable information on the potentially unintended and undesired consequences of a crime prevention intervention.