I suspect that the idea that opportunistic looting can be explained by organised gangs is, no matter what the Prime Minister said this morning, a questionable premise. Nevertheless, it was interesting and encouraging to see him reference the work done by the Violence Reduction Unit at Strathclyde Police. Interesting because their approach to gang-related violence demonstrates just how tricky the problem is and how “traditional” policing and criminal justice approaches fail to have much, if any, useful impact.
Here’s a terrific and freshly-relevent Prospect piece that explains how the project has worked in Glasgow and, before that, in Boston. Karyn McCluskey is a very impressive person and, in my limited experience, someone worth listening to. And her experience, I think, has found that neither favoured “right-wing” or “left-wing” policies actually work. That is, neither “punishment” nor addressing “underlying causes” is enough. What matters – and here the Prime Minister may have seized upon the most important thing of all – is the moral dimension. Shame and stigma matter more than prison. That seems to be one lesson to be taken from the Boston and Glasgow experiences. As the Prospect article explains:
In a sense, this is an old-fashioned approach re-tooled for the modern ned. You don’t behave like this because it’s wrong to behave like this and because, well, look at what you’re doing to yourselves, your families, your community. Get a grip. but getting that message across takes time and may not always work. It is, if you like, an addiction problem: until the addict accepts there’s a problem any solution is likely to be temporary at best or, worse, counter-productive.
The difficulty with this approach is that it is both innovative and simple and thus the kind of thing at which it’s easy to scoff and hard to believe in. Nevertheless, there it is. The evidence from Glasgow is that it can have a useful impact, even if, like all approaches, it cannot and never will work universal wonders. We should not expect too much from it, or any other, programme just as we should recognise that what works in one city may not be easily transferred to work in another.
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