European Refugee Crisis In Sweden: 1% Of Swedish Crime Involved Asylum-Seekers, Report Finds

While Swedish police last month said they dealt with more than 5,000 incidents involving refugees in a three-month span, a report Tuesday revealed only 1 percent of all police calls between last October and January involved refugees, the Local reported.

Police in Sweden responded to more than 530,000 incidents between the middle of October and the end of January, meaning the 5,000 incidents with refugees accounted for 1 percent of all calls, the Local reported. To help them track refugee incidents, Swedish police gave calls dealing with refugees a special designation in October when the country was experiencing a record influx, as many as 10,000 a week trying to register.

"Given the enormous attention that crime among new arrivals has been given in the past six months, one percent does not sound like a lot,” Felipe Estrada, a criminology professor at Stockholm University, reportedly said to Dagens Nyheter. “It means that 99 percent of what the police do cannot be linked to new arrivals."

The new designation for refugee calls covers incidents where refugees are victims or those said to have committed the crimes. At the peak of refugee registration in Sweden, police saw a spike in calls for crimes at asylum centers last year, when Sweden took in more than 163,000 people seeking asylum, the Local reported.

Tensions have been high across Europe with the influx of refugees, many of whom are from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq escaping their war-torn countries. Police arrested 14 Poles Tuesday in Sweden who they said were suspected of planning attacks on refugees with iron pipes and axes, the BBC reported.

In January, about 100 masked men came together in Stockholm to attack immigrants. Syrian refugees began flooding Sweden in 2013, but the country has since tightened its flow because officials said the number of refugees coming into the country was unsustainable.

The Local's report cited the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.