Scottish city Glasgow once held a grim title: "the murder capital of Europe"
but levels of violence in the city have fallen by 60% in just over a decade
all thanks to a radical approach: treating violence as a disease.
Here's how Scotland is curing violent crime.
Growing levels of alcohol abuse, unemployment and inequality between the
1980s and early 2000s had contributed to a social crisis in Scotland.
By 2005 the crime rate had reached its highest levels in a decade and the
United Nations released a report which named Scotland as the most violent place in
the developed world
But it was in Scotland's largest city Glasgow where the problem was most severe.
Nightly I can anticipate around a dozen calls for gang
fighting on the street or group disorder outside somebody's home.
This high concentration of gang violence had pushed Glasgow's murder rate almost three times
higher than the rest of the country
But in 2005, in response to the growing
crisis Glasgow's regional police force set up the Violence Reduction Unit or VRU.
It became the only police force in the world to take a public health
approach to violence
That meant treating violence as a preventable disease rather
than just as a criminal matter.
The VRU's new strategy was inspired by the
work of Gary Slutkin, an American physician who'd spent a decade fighting
cholera and AIDS epidemics across Africa during the '80s and '90s
When he came back to Chicago
Slutkin was confronted with another epidemic: gun violence.
I can get a gun anytime I want.
After mapping crime data he noticed that violence followed the same
patterns as contagious diseases.
One act led directly to another and these were
often found clustered together.
He also found that violence could be transmitted between people.
If a person was exposed to violence it increased the likelihood
that they would commit violence.
In 2000, Slutkin created a pilot project on the
west side of Chicago which controlled outbreaks of violence in a similar way
to health epidemics and focuses on three key areas.
First to find the cause of an outbreak and interrupt its transmission to other people.
This work is carried out by violence interrupters, people with an
established relationship with the community who can help identify symptoms
and eliminate the root causes of violence.
Second is to identify people
who might be at risk of developing violent behavior and try to prevent it from happening.
This is done by offering alternatives to gang membership through
employment, housing and health support.
Finally an important step is to change
attitudes towards violence, making communities understand that it's
something preventable not inevitable.
This approach has been adapted by the
Violence Reduction Unit in Scotland.
But as well as helping people break free
from violence, the VRU has also advocated for stronger penalties for those who
continue on a path of crime.
Through lobbying the penalty for carrying a
knife in Scotland has tripled in ten years.
By 2006 Scotland had extended the
work of the VRU nationwide and during the following decade violent crime fell
by 49 percent, including murders which were reduced by 47 percent.
These dramatic reductions have helped to ease the burden on the Scottish healthcare system
with hospital emergency assault admissions down by 56 percent since 2007.
And the benefits of a reduced crime rate are economic too.
Each homicide case in
the UK is estimated to cost the taxpayer 2.3 million dollars which is more than
the cost of running the VRU for an entire year.
While Scotland is aiming to
achieve the lowest levels of crime in the world by 2025, at the other end of
the country London has seen a recent surge in knife crime.
In the year to May 2018
there were 97 fatal stabbings and so the UK capital has announced it will
be one of many cities around the world looking to follow Scotland's example in
the hope of breaking the cycle of violence.