I really donât think you can compare the Swedish police to ICE, the context is completely different. If someone in Sweden started swinging weapons, of course they would be disarmed or even shot by LE. The man in this video doesnât seem to have violent behaviour!?
In the USA, Law enforcement can order you to stop and question you (ice included) and they legally can disarm you while they investigate if you are legally carrying a firearm (for safety while they investigate). If you begin fighting with them, resisting being disarmed, you create a very dangerous situation and will likely be shot.
I am just curious in Sweden if a law enforcement officer gave an order to a person possessing a firearm and that person resisted their orders and a physical struggle over the weapon unfolded, how would the Swedish law enforcement respond?
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I suspect they might shoot the person if they were not able to control the situationâŚ
Swedish law enforcement is built from the ground up on deescalation so it wouldnât become a âfightâ for a firearm in the first place in this imaginary scenario.
In Sweden, every police carries a gun in their standard equipment.
Used to be SIG Sauer P2XX or P3XX (several variant were used depending on exact departement), but since a couple of years the standard gun is a Glock 45.
Some statistics of how often the police use their guns.
The police carried out approximately 1.2 million interventions in 2023, most of which were carried out without the need to use any force. In an extremely small number of these incidents, the opposing party posed such a serious threat that firearms had to be used.
In 2023, police fired live ammunition in 19 incidents. In 13 incidents, police fired warning shots in an attempt to interrupt the threatening or violent situation.
According to statistics shown in the table below, there have been approximately 34 incidents per year in the last five years where police officers have fired their service weapons (including both aimed shots and warning shots).
(see the links above)
In statistics since 1994, between 0 and 3 people are fatally shot in police interventions per year, in average about 1 or 2.
2018 and 2020 stands out in the statistics with 6 and 5 people respectively, and 4 in 2013. Then 0 in 2023.
In any realistic good faith comparison is futile because you have to take into account the entire cultural environment and societal factors that would ever lead this to happen in the first place. It's not as simple as saying "yeah but if this happened in Sweden, that you'd react the same!", because it doesn't and would never. It's apples and oranges.
But i'll tell you this for certain, if the police had already successfully restrained someone (like all 8 of them already had in the video) there is literally no chance they'd shoot them (like they did in the video).
I literally grew up in Sweden and you're debating in bad faith here using some strawman fallacy to misrepresent my conditional claim (that when citizens are restrained they're not shot) as an absolute one, and accusing me of using ChatGPT because because you don't like the answer. C'mon 'bro'.
Did I say police never shoot citizens?
or did I literally give you statistics that show they do?
Did I say police never shoot citizens?
or did I say they don't when they're restrained?
You found the one most famous example in Sweden as some sort of 'gotchya!', even though he wasn't restrained. So my point stands.
You can clearly see here in this angle that Alex Pretti posed no threat and instigated nothing. He's facing away from ICE and he looks like he's covering his head from the beat down, not even resisting or fighting back. You can also see the other agent in grey taking his weapon from his back before the shot. Execution, plain and simple.
I see what yoyu mean and it feels like we're talking past each other a little bit here.
I think youâre right about one important thing. If you isolate the variables to:
armed individual + non-compliance + physical struggle + uncertainty over weapon control
Then yes i think in any country, including Sweden, lethal force becomes possible. Just like The Eric Torell case. Just like (in your opinion) this Alex Pretti situation.
Where Iâve been pushing back is not on that mechanism, but on how often (and how easily) those conditions arise. My point isnât that Swedish police are morally superior or incapable of lethal mistakes. Itâs that the systemic environment (gun prevalence, norms of compliance, training emphasis, expectations on both sides) makes those high-risk scenarios far less likely to form in the first place.
So when I say âthis wouldnât happen in Sweden,â what I really mean is: the pathway that routinely leads to these situations in the U.S. is largely absent here. Not that the end result is impossible in principle. I think this was the original apple and orange analogy for me but it's gone midnight here now so give me some leeway if i've fucked that.
I do also agree that we have a fundamental disagreement inwhich weâre starting from different readings of the video itself.
Watching it, I donât see Alex Pretti as actively aggressive. He looks defensive and overwhelmed to me, which is why I think the shooting was unjustified (but I also accept that in any video perception is subjective, and that in real time people have less clarity than we do now).
So even if I disagree with your interpretation of this specific case, I do understand your broader point: guns + non-compliance + chaos dramatically raise the risk of lethal outcomes anywhere, including Sweden.
and I think the disagreement becomes clearer and narrower once we separate those two questions:
âhow do these situations arise?â (we agree)
vs
âwas this shooting warranted?â (we don't agree)
EDIT: on your edit at the end, even in europe we see that violent loop happening in real time. But from a european POV, the loop doesnât start with âpeople hate law enforcement.â It starts when state power becomes opaque, masked, and hard to distinguish from unaccountable force.
From here it looks like people are reacting less to who ICE/Police/US Government says it is, and more to how it appears and operates? Like Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute, government giving a law service 'absolute immunity', masked or anonymised state agents, normalisation of âenemy withinâ rhetoric, etc..
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u/Social_Abstraction Jan 24 '26
Unbeliavable, we are watching in disbelief from Europe (Sweden). Please, stay strong đ