London is looking to Scotland for a new strategy in fighting the knife crime epidemic.

Glasgow, United Kingdom – John Lewis was 32 years old when, on May 14, in Middlesbrough, north-east England, he became the 100th person this year to be killed in a stabbing in Britain.

England, the most populous UK constituent nation at 55.6 million people, accounted for the highest number of recorded deaths. While Greater Manchester saw 10 fatalities and the West Midlands eight, 30 of the fatal knife attacks occurred in London. Victims were mainly young and male.

London, which witnessed a further two stabbings on May 19, leaving one teenager in critical condition and another seriously injured, has been in the grip of a knife crime spree. Last year, 134 individuals were murdered or unlawfully killed in the UK capital – the bloodiest total in a decade. Of those, 76 people were stabbed to death.

In September 2018, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced the creation of the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in a bid to stem the rising tide of violence in the city.

London’s VRU will be hoping to emulate its counterpart established in 2005 in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow. The Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU) has been credited with curbing Glasgow’s once notorious violent crime culture, which saw the city become the murder capital of Europe and its gangs indulge in so-called “Glasgow smiles” – knife cuts that begin at each corner of a victim’s mouth and run up their cheeks.

“When we looked at the figures over 20-30 years of [policing] work that had been done in the west coast of Scotland and in Glasgow, we realised that our [violent crime] trajectory was going in the wrong direction,” says Will Linden, co-deputy director of the SVRU.

“So… in order to reduce the violence we needed to take a wider look at this and think differently. We needed to look at things like education, health, academia, the workplace and the third sector.”

Linden told Al Jazeera that the SVRU began with an ethos that looked beyond a simple strategy of “sending bad people to prison”.

As such, a public health approach to fighting violent crime – including stabbings – was born in Scotland. This included healthcare specialists, such as trauma surgeons, visiting schools to share their experiences of treating knife attacks, and offering teenagers an alternative to joining gangs.

Just over 10 years after the SVRU began its work, the statistics were encouraging. In 2004-05, there were 137 homicides in Scotland – a UK nation of just 5.4 million people – which included 40 incidents in Glasgow alone. By 2016-17, there were just 62 murders in Scotland.

London’s unit is based on this ground-breaking Scottish approach. In January 2019, Khan stated: “We have looked and learnt from cities like Glasgow and we know that they have had success in tackling crime with similar initiatives. In London, the Violence Reduction Unit will lead the capital’s response to understanding the causes of violent crime and working to stop it spreading by bringing together specialists from right across the city.”

But not everybody believes that following Scotland’s lead is the correct approach.

“I’m not sure why we’re following Scotland,” says Sheldon Thomas, founder and chief executive of Gangsline – a London charity which provides support to young people involved in gang culture. “I’m not sure why we try to copy what other people do, instead of trying to come up with something completely different.”

Thomas, himself a former gang member in the 1970s, and who claims that England as a whole doesn’t invest the necessary funds in tackling violent crime, says that it is already “too late for London”.

“That is why every single week, we have had a murder and we have had a stabbing,” he adds to Al Jazeera.

Linden, however, remains optimistic that London’s new unit can succeed.

“London can be a success if they manage to actually understand the problem and apply the right solutions,” he states.

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