&gt; dailymail.co.uk<p>If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I&#x27;ve been wrong all these years.<p>In the present case, even if it weren&#x27;t an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail&#x27;s preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be <i>impossibly</i> rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey.<p>A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x.<p>So, let&#x27;s look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell.<p>Well. <i>Did</i> Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rape_in_Sweden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rape_in_Sweden</a> you will find this: &quot;Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013.&quot;<p>And, a little further down, this: &quot;Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape.&quot;<p>I know you&#x27;ve got a data-science background. Put on your analyst&#x27;s hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you <i>really</i> find it credible? At all?<p>There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they&#x27;re all coming from the same side.