It was Europe’s murder capital. Then Glasgow stopped excluding kids from school

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1. Earlier this month Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Met Police, described in gruesome detail what a working day can look like for his officers. They sometimes go home “covered in blood”, he said, because they’ve tried to “stop a teenager bleeding out”.

   Just 10 days earlier, 14 year old Kelyan Bokassa had been [stabbed to death](https://inews.co.uk/news/boy-14-stabbed-to-death-on-a-bus-in-south-east-london-3467176?ico=in-line_link) on a double-decker bus in Woolwich. Another teen, 15 year old Daejun Campbell, was killed the same way in the same borough not long before. Rowley expressed a fear that the death of young Black men on London’s streets was becoming normalised. He bemoaned a lack of “collective effort” and called on ministers, local authorities, community groups and charities to “get around the table”. “How on earth,” he asked, “can probably the world’s greatest city not do better on this?”

   The question of how to solve what seems like a [knife-crime epidemic](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/i-was-a-police-officer-and-this-is-what-i-want-you-to-know-about-knife-crime-in-london-142148?srsltid=AfmBOoo8mGws68BTwr-DMiw9-e0zKBaDq5HNK0wh5k7zY0UkFQTrmr87&ico=in-line_link) is one that many of us are currently asking. And any search for how to “do better”; for innovative solutions to knife crime leads straight to Scotland and the work of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU), which was founded in 2005 after WHO had dubbed Glasgow ‘the murder capital of Europe’.

   “Scotland was one of the most unsafe countries to live in,” says SVRU Head, Jimmy Paul.

   In 2005, there were 152 homicides in Scotland. There were 170 street gangs across Glasgow, with as many as 3,500 members aged between 11 and 23. Someone was given the ‘Glasgow Smile’ on its city streets every six hours, a horrific, life-altering facial wound: a cut from the corners of the mouth right up to the ears.

   The SVRU was initially led by John Carnochan, former Detective Chief Superintendent with Strathclyde Police, and forensic psychologist Karyn McCluskey. “They said they were going to lock themselves in a dark room before they went back out to deliver,” says Jimmy Paul. There was no question that they needed to come up with something new. Detection wasn’t the problem here – there was a 98 per cent detection rate, but filling the cells, the courts and the jails wasn’t working.

   “Flooding the areas with yellow coats didn’t stop violence, it just shifted it down the road. The approach that Carnochan and McCluskey devised was preventative, a public health approach,” he says.

   The idea was to treat [violence](https://inews.co.uk/news/knife-crime-uk-school-league-table-rankings-kick-pupils-out-267963?srsltid=AfmBOooWXOzzEI7HSYAnHoy0Phxs0TljdqjkPMWE6nMrANI5OeTEnEBV&ico=in-line_link) as an infection – and work on causes, interrupting transmission and changing behaviour. “The crucial part was galvanising everyone – judges, teachers, parents, doctors, dentists, carers, youth workers – to help them see that everyone has a role to play.”

   One of its early policies was the ‘call in’. “The police knew who belonged to gangs,” say Paul. “They were all approached, and asked to be in the high court on a certain day at a certain time.” Much to everyone’s surprise, many turned up. “The court was full of young men.”

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