Ali Hussein was six or seven years old. Outside the apartment, flames were flickering. A building was on fire, and figures dressed in black were running around in the darkness.
»I started to cry. My mother told me not to be afraid. But I was. When we moved here, there were so many gangs outside my house. They were dressed in black. I looked at them through the window and asked my parents: Who are they? Why are there so many of them?«
He had just started school, and a few days later, he saw the dark-clad figures at school. They were in the upper grades. Today, he is 14 years old and in the seventh grade.
»There is a big difference between then and now. There aren’t as many people who look like gang members, and those who are here are much friendlier. They don’t speak harshly. There was always a cloud over Tingbjerg. Now it’s different. The school has improved. Some of my friends dropped out because of things that happened. But many have come back,« says Ali Hussein, who came to Denmark from India when he was two years old.
There are 22 students in the class. All have foreign roots. Their parents or grandparents come from countries such as Poland, Romania, Albania, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Senegal, Portugal, and Afghanistan.
»Previously, everything was really dark in Tingbjerg. More people were getting beaten up. Many spoke poorly to each other. There’s still a bit of that today, but not as much. Now it’s better,« says Ana Maria, whose parents are from Romania. She is one of four Christians in an otherwise Muslim class but rarely thinks about it.
»Maybe sometimes when there’s Eid and most people have the day off. That’s the only time I feel a difference. The rest of the time, I don’t.«
Two statements are particularly common among the students. Tingbjerg is a safe village where everyone knows everyone, and they are happy with their class and their school. The new Tingbjerg in northwestern Copenhagen and the transformed school are not just figments of the students’ imagination.
In 2008, the average grade point was around 4 when students left school after 9th grade. The average fluctuates from year to year but has steadily increased over the last 15 years in Tingbjerg. Today, according to the Ministry of Education, it is around 7.0, just like the rest of the country.
In 2017, only 63 percent of students began a youth education program after 9th grade. That was far below the national average. Today, the numbers range between 95 and 99 percent, significantly above the national average of 86 percent.
But in the end, the bad guys laughed
Tingbjerg was once a beautiful dream. A social democratic welfare dream of a working class that was supposed to move away from the dark backyards of the inner city to be rehoused in architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s modernist low yellow brick houses, built in the fifties on a huge grassy slope by the beautiful marsh in Utterslev.
But since the nineties, the approximately 7,000 residents have lived in two realities. A green and friendly reality wrapped in daylight, passionate souls, and well-meaning integration projects, and another when the sun went down. Then the princes of darkness took over, blood flowed, new generations of little brothers became brutal gang members, and the only original Danes left were alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and those who were all of the above.
Whenever the good started to smile, it inevitably ended with the bad guys laughing, and in 2006, resident Gülan Sahin wrote here in Politiken:
»Tingbjerg is a stain on the map of Copenhagen and a scratch on Denmark as a rich, western, enlightened, and tolerant society. Tingbjerg is Denmark’s ’id’, the place where all taboos are located. Drug addicts, pyromaniacs, gamblers, alcoholics, cash welfare recipients, first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants, especially the Muslim ones like myself, live here. (...) Tingbjerg is a nightmare for integration, criminal justice, and for anyone who hopes to give their children a good future.«
In 2008, a young man was executed on Ruten, the road that runs through Tingbjerg. It happened again in 2013, and one morning in 2018, then Minister of Integration for Venstre, Inger Støjberg, got really angry.
A bakery on Ruten had burned down, allegedly because the 19-year-old owner refused to pay protection money. Now the minister addressed the criminal environment in Tingbjerg directly with all their »Middle Eastern norms« and their »brutal culture«. She wanted to visit the now destroyed bakery that day and do everything to ensure they were punished.
»How I wish you had the courage and heart to come by so I could say it directly to you, but you cowardly hide behind balaclavas and hoodies,« she wrote on Facebook in connection with her visit to Tingbjerg under extensive media coverage.
Seven years later, another Minister of Integration is walking through here. The National Integration Council has invited Kaare Dybvad Bek (Socialdemokratiet) to Tingbjerg. He needs to see that the changes appear to be permanent and that it doesn’t seem like a new restless and rootless generation of culturally confused, defeated, angry young men in hoodies, Nike shoes, cheap gold chains, and wide-wheeled cars are coming with knives and guns.
Afterward, Dybvad is pleased with what he has seen.
»In the past, Tingbjerg was a place where refugees were settled, but also those who were displaced from urban renewal projects in Vesterbro and Nørrebro. It became a supermarket of misery, with all forms of social deprivation concentrated in one spot. Now it’s an area undergoing significant change. Through a series of municipal initiatives, including investments in schools and employment programs, the development has successfully been turned around,« he says.
Fundamentally, he knew it already. Because here at the beginning of 2025, Kaare Dybvad Bek did something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
When The New York Times came to Denmark to learn about the country’s immigration policy, Kaare Dybvad Bek decided to take the journalist to Tingbjerg.
Here, he thought there was something »worth showing off.«
Significant drop in crime
Jonas Wybrandt, head of the local police department in Copenhagen Police, views it the same way.
»The things we saw five to ten years ago – bins on fire, shootings, criminal gangs, damaged buses – we don’t see at all anymore,« he says and adds:
»It is an area that has undergone an incredible positive development.«
The numbers tell the same story. In 2015, only 46 percent of residents felt safe walking around the neighborhood at night. Today, it’s 67 percent. It’s still lower than Copenhagen as a whole, where 80 percent feel safe. But according to Copenhagen Municipality’s safety survey from May 2025, it is a »statistically significant improvement, indicating that the many targeted efforts in the area are bearing fruit.«
At the same time, the area experiences a significant drop in reports to the police. Compared to the whole of Copenhagen, Tingbjerg-Husum is today below the average for crime reports. The report rate is 46 reports per 1,000 inhabitants, while the number for all of Copenhagen is 73.
Not everything is perfect, though. A man in his forties was stabbed on June 10 and was admitted to Rigshospitalet without being in critical condition. The perpetrator has not yet been found, and although the gang Loyal to Familia is no longer allowed to wear patches, there are still pockets of the gang in Tingbjerg, according to Politiken’s information. From Kaare Dybvad’s perspective, there are also too many children named Aisha, Fatima, and Mohamed, and too few named Emilie, Amalie, and Aske.
»I think it’s a challenge if 80 percent of the population continues to have an ethnic background. To be blunt, the Danish parents who are moving here, possibly attracted by reduced-price townhouses, might still opt for private schools. I believe some of them will do just that if the population composition doesn’t change.«
The school, however, has a significant share in the positive transformation the neighborhood has undergone.
Blaming others
In 2013, Marco Damgaard, 28 years old, had just arrived at Tingbjerg School to start as deputy head. He knew the school’s reputation, but it still struck him how poorly everyone spoke about it. In Tingbjerg, among the students, among the parents, and in the teachers’ lounge.
»It was an extremely destructive rhetoric. Everyone could only agree that it was someone else’s fault that Tingbjerg was doing so poorly. It was the politicians’ fault, the media’s fault, the rich people in Brønshøj on the other side of the lake’s fault,« says Marco Damgård, who left the school at the turn of the year and became the social democratic mayor of Herlev.
He also became part of the rhetoric.
»We teachers were a huge sustaining factor, more preoccupied with sweeping everything under the rug than figuring out what worked, where there was potential, and what we could do.«
There was dissatisfaction at all levels. Between teachers and students, between parents and teachers, between educators and teachers, among the students.
»There were children who spoke rudely or were outright violent towards each other. Children who spoke rudely to teachers and educators, children who were disrespectful and who were constantly in arguments.«
In front of the management’s office stood a blue sofa. If a teacher couldn’t manage a student, it was out of the classroom and up to the blue sofa.
»On a single day, there were probably well over 20 children sent up there. It was intense.«
The same was true for the numbers. In 2014, only 33 percent of parents in Tingbjerg chose to enroll their children in the school. Instead, they sent them outside the district, mostly to private Muslim schools.
»We were genuinely at risk of being shut down. The parents didn’t believe in us. So as school leaders, and I as the head of the primary department, we had two crucial tasks. We needed to create a calm and supportive environment and convince people to choose our school again.«
The big dangerous recess
First, all students needed to feel safe during recess.
»We had skilled teachers among us, but during breaks, it was chaos. The big recess can be challenging at any school. Here it was survival of the fittest.«
Instead of one or two yard monitors with a cup of coffee in hand, and 400 children running free, the leadership and union representatives for teachers and educators decided to introduce ’the good student break.’ There had to be a teacher or an educator from each class out during recess. Instead of two teachers as yard monitors, there were now about 30.
»They had to lead activities and participate in play. We opened the gym, we opened the workshop, we had adults present when playing dodgeball. We opened everything, but the most important thing was that everyone could feel safe.«
There was resistance among the teachers. If they had to be out when the students took a break, they could never take a break themselves. Some teachers left, but it was implemented, says Marco Damgaard.
»With the old system, everyone sat in the teachers’ lounge, and every five or ten minutes someone came running in shouting: »Where’s the class teacher for sixth grade? There’s a fight.« There was a stressed war-like atmosphere. With the new initiative, half the staff were out in the school, and the other half could take a break.«
Removing the blue sofa
In 2017, Marco Damgaard was appointed headmaster. The first thing he did was remove the blue sofa. Disruptive students had to stay in the classroom. Since the school received significantly more money for each student than an average Danish public school, it was possible to have two adults in each class: a teacher and an educator. Then Marco Damgaard joined the societal debate on democratic formation, integration, and schools where 80 percent had roots in other countries.
»Tingbjerg School should be a good old-fashioned Danish public school. Not a special school, not an international school. A school where democratic formation, which is part of the school’s objects clause, comes above everything else together with the children’s academic learning. It should be the end of silly religious considerations that were at odds with democratic formation.«
Since then, all students have had to shower after gym class. Teachers can teach about the Muhammad cartoons if it’s relevant. Parents cannot demand that their children be exempted from Christian teachings in religion classes.
»Some parents were quite confrontational with us, but we stood our ground. We also started hanging pride flags during Pride Week in the schoolyard and discussing diversity. We called it ’Different Together,’ and it’s still the school’s slogan. There was no issue with the teachers. They were ready and incredibly good at getting started.«
Pork was introduced in the cafeteria.
»We implemented that you could eat both halal and vegetarian and pork at school, and invited all the parents to the school to show how it worked in the kitchen. Here on this table is turkey halal bacon with a pictogram and a sign. Here is pork bacon with a pictogram and a sign. One father believed there was a risk his first-grade son might make a mistake and eat pork bacon instead of turkey bacon. Then our fantastic school board chairwoman, Farida, who is herself Muslim, stepped forward and said: »Yes, yes. I’ve also accidentally eaten pork sometimes. You don’t die from it.« I couldn’t say that. But she could.«
In 2017, something new happened in Tingbjerg again. A revolutionary report was published. Read on in chapter 2.
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