Fact check: Is Sweden as unsafe as Trump says?

Donald Trump has unleashed a fresh barrage of criticism against various European countries, particularly regarding the way they are handling immigration.

The US president took aim at the cities of Paris and London, as well as Germany and Sweden, in a 9 December interview with Politico. He accused Europe of being "weak" and in "decay" because countries are too focused on being "politically correct".

"If you look at Sweden, Sweden was known as the safest country in Europe, one of the safest countries in the world," Trump said. "Now it's known as a very unsafe, well, quite unsafe country. It's hard to believe that's true; it's a completely different country."

At a later point in the interview, he slammed European countries for allowing "millions of people to pour into their countries" and that "many of these people are committing tremendous crimes".

"Again, look at Sweden," the US president said. "I'm not bashing Sweden, I love Sweden. I love the Swedish people, but it has gone from being a country free of crime to a country that now has a lot of crime."

But how safe is Sweden, well-known for having a relatively low crime rate, really?

The Cube, Euronews' fact-checking team, has taken a look at some of the data.

European countries are among the safest and most peaceful in the world

Several different metrics can point us towards an answer, such as the Global Peace Index, which measures a country's levels of safety and security, the conflicts it's involved in, and how militarised it is.

Sweden ranked 35th out of 163 countries here, scoring 1.709 — the closer to one, the more peaceful and safe a country supposedly is.

In fact, European countries dominate the top of the table: eight out of the top 10 are European, with Iceland and Ireland leading the way at 1.095 and 1.26, respectively.

Compare this to the US, which came in 128th place and scored 2.443.

Another way we can compare Sweden's safety levels with those of its neighbours and the US is by taking numbers from Eurostat, which logged every EU member's homicide rates per 100,000 people, and the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which did the same for the states.

While these aren't the same datasets, meaning their methodologies are slightly different, they can help us to see what the situation is like on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2023, Sweden's homicide rate came in at 1.15 per 100,000 people, up from 0.9 in 2014. This means that, in theory, there is some credibility to the claim that Sweden has become less safe during that time.

There is a growing and concerning trend of increased gang violence in Sweden that authorities are taking seriously.

The number of fatal shootings, in particular, has increased steeply since 2013, even as the number went down in other European countries, taking Swedish criminologists by surprise.

Most violence is carried out by criminal gangs driven by turf wars and drug trade, with the perpetrators and victims often young men recruited for such tasks.

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention has highlighted the growing role of social media platforms such as TikTok, where perpetrators often glorify their crimes.

In response to the trend, in October, the Swedish government unveiled a proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13, in a bid to tackle what it says is the growing problem of criminal gangs recruiting minors to carry out violence.

Authorities announced recently that the number of active gang criminals in the country has remained stable in 2025, with numbers showing neither an increase nor a decrease.

Still, compared to the US, Sweden is safer than the safest state: New Hampshire's homicide rate was 1.9 in 2023, according to the NCHS.

The District of Columbia comes in at 33.1, topping the US list and far higher than Sweden, with all the other states in between.

It's also significantly higher than every other European country, according to the same Eurostat data: Latvia (4.20), Turkey (2.54) and Lithuania (2.41) have the steepest rates, before dropping off slightly to Belgium (1.38).

The lowest homicide rates in Europe in 2023 were seen in Liechtenstein (0.0), Malta (0.37) and Italy (0.57), Eurostat said.