This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Business hotels, offices and melting snow line the streets around Rådmansgatan, a busy central Stockholm district that’s also home to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. It’s a government-funded authority that’s been investigating deadly shootings here.

“Sweden has always been viewed as [an] extremely safe country, maybe one of the top safe countries in the world,” said Klara Hradilova Selin, a researcher at the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “And this image is falling apart, obviously.”

Gun crime has been a growing problem in Sweden for the last decade. 2022 was a record year with more than 60 deadly shootings. There were around 50 deadly shootings in the first 10 months of 2023.

“It’s still very low risk for you to get shot once you leave your house. But at the same time, it seems to be a little bit larger than it was before,” said Hradilova Selin. “Lately, we have seen several cases where the victims were not part of the criminal environment at all, either being shot accidentally or purposely because the perpetrator just wanted to hurt somebody close to the actual target.”

The violence is causing jitters in Sweden’s business community, where there are worries about how the violence is impacting the country’s global brand. A senior leader at Volvo cars, Thomas Andersson, recently told Swedish media that he feared it could get harder to recruit workers from overseas.

That mood was echoed in a survey of 300 business leaders in Stockholm and the nearby university city of Uppsala. Eight out of 10 companies said they think it will become more difficult to attract visitors, investors and foreign workers if the violence continues.

“And if that’s the case, Swedish companies will have a competitive disadvantage against other cities and regions and countries across the world,” said Andreas Hatzigeorgiou, CEO of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, which carried out the survey with polling firm Novus.

Hatzigeorgiou spoke to Swedish public radio about the results in October. “Business leaders are fearing that they will lose out because Sweden and Stockholm is considered insecure,” he said.

But Hatzigeorgiou said he’s hopeful the violent trend can be reversed and insists Sweden remains a great place to do business.

There has been a dip in the frequency of shootings over the last few weeks, and Sweden’s government has a string of new policies designed to tackle the problem — from tougher prison sentences to stop-and-search zones. Many of the suspects and victims have parents born abroad, and the right-wing coalition says it will also take aim at immigration and “integration” policies.

There is an ongoing sense of insecurity here, though. Swedes are used to their country having a reputation for best-selling music, fashion and furniture brands — not for being a European hotspot for deadly shootings.