The lessons politicians don’t want to learn from Glasgow’s knife crime strategy

London’s knife-crime epidemic is back in the news. Tomorrow the Damilola Taylor Trust is holding a lecture at which the founders of Glasgow’s Violence Reduction Unit will explain what lessons London might learn from their experience. Their distinctive ‘public health’ approach is widely held to have been successful and it is frequently contrasted with a strategy of law enforcement. Champions of the public-health approach can be identified by their predilection for referring to the problem of knife crime as ‘issues around’ knife crime and their enthusiasm for finding ‘reachable and teachable moments’ when dealing with offenders caught with a knife. They oppose a pure criminal-justice approach but do not seem to have noticed that arresting criminals, trying them according to law, and punishing them as the law stipulates also reaches and teaches. It not only reaches and teaches the offender but also others who might be tempted to carry knives. It arms parents, teachers, youth workers and others who hope to discourage young people from joining gangs with a very powerful argument: do you really want to end up in jail along with the previous generation of gang members?

But it’s not just that campaigners for a public-health strategy fail to see the true impact of effective enforcement, they also conveniently ignore how Scotland achieved its reduction in violent crime. They should take note, for example, of public statements made by John Carnochan, the co-director of Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit from its inception in 2005. Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan is now retired and better able to speak freely about how the scheme worked. He told reporters earlier this year that, while prevention was a major part of the project: ‘Criminal justice still needed to be there and seen to be done swiftly. Sometimes it gets portrayed that we didn’t do that.

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