Met police chief to visit Scotland for ideas to reduce knife crime

The Metropolitan police commissioner is travelling to Scotland to seek a solution to London’s knife crime epidemic, after two men were stabbed to death within two hours of each other in Camden on Tuesday night.

Cressida Dick will visit Glasgow on Friday to learn more about Police Scotland’s pioneering work on tackling knife crime in the city once known as the stabbing capital of Europe.

The Guardian has learned that Dick will meet those involved in setting up Scotland’s violence reduction unit (VRU), as well as police and other agencies. The private trip takes place amid urgent calls for action as knife violence in London reaches its highest level in 10 years.

Dick told the London assembly at the beginning of January that it was time to treat knife crime as a public health crisis, an approach credited with dramatically reducing deaths in Scotland, which little more than a decade ago had the second highest murder rate in western Europe. Of the 39 children and young people killed with knives in the UK last year, not one was in Scotland.

The VRU was set up in 2005 to tackle Glasgow’s deeply rooted blade culture that had barely moved on since the Gorbals gangland was immortalised in the 1935 novel No Mean City. Since then all knife crime rates have been incrementally reduced. Assaults involving knives had fallen by a third by 2012 and there was a 69% drop in recorded incidents of people carrying knives by 2016, according to Police Scotland figures.

The VRU famously adapted initiatives first used in the US city of Boston in the 1990s, targeting known gang members, asking other members of their community, including bereaved mothers, to explain the ripple effects of violence, and offering young men a way out through education, training and mentorship.

The key was providing a moral as well as a punitive imperative to change behaviour. The unit also lobbied successfully for increases in the maximum sentences for carrying knives, and focused on early education through the No Knives Better Lives (NKBL) programme in schools.

London-based campaigners gave a cautious welcome to the news of Dick’s visit to Glasgow. Pat Green, the chief executive of the Ben Kinsella Trust, said: “What we really like is the sustained level of investment by the Scottish government that follows young people from an early age through their teens and gives them every chance possible to find the right path. In England and Wales, education is left to organisations like ourselves.”

He pointed to the work of the NKBL, which is funded by the Scottish government and produces a resource pack for working with children from the age of 10 onwards, using role play to teach them about responsibility, risk and consequence.

Describing a feeling of helplessness after the recent murders in London, Green said: “We would hope that this visit is a signal of intent but there have been too many false dawns. I’m delighted that she’s going up to Glasgow, but it’s not her decision in the end and we need cross-party support from politicians to implement the lessons learned from Scotland.”

Temi Mwale, the founder of the the 4Front Project, which works with young people affected by street violence, warned against trying to transplant a successful model from one city into another: “I don’t want ‘public health approach’ just to become a buzzword,” she said.

Noting that the relationship between the police and young people in Glasgow had diffrent challenges to those in London, she said: “The key [in London] is the inter-generational relationship in particular between the black community and the police. There is a whole generation of young people who will not call the police even if their life is in danger.”

Mwale, who has also visited Glasgow to observe the knife crime strategy, said: “To be honest, the work that I saw wasn’t hugely different to the work we are doing in London, but what Scotland had was the political will for everyone to align around it. Less working in silos and working for the long term, that’s what Glasgow did right.”