283 - Let the youth live - part two
The second part of a serialised interview with DJ Sweet Li on solutions to UK youth violence
Photo: Lisa / DJ Sweet Li with the first life saving bleed control cabinet in East Dulwich, London.
Part two
This is the second part of an interview series with Lisa aka DJ Sweet Li who runs “Let the youth live”, a London based community project seeking solutions to UK knife and gun violence and saving lives with the roll out of bleed control kits.
As before, my comments and questions are in brackets. Jeth
Click below to read part one some of the content of which is referred to in the following discussion :
How violence was successfully lowered in Glasgow
(Jeth - You mentioned the initiatives in Glasgow - See part one: LINK - what was the method there and how did it work?)
Lisa: Glasgow was one of the most violent cities with the highest rates of knife crime & the third highest murder rate in Europe.
A police man called John Carnican initiated a gang truce which was eventually funded & rolled out by the government across Scotland.
John got all the guys from gangs together in groups of 80/90 at a time. He said to them we've had enough of this , the communities have had enough of this and you've had enough of this. It needs to stop and when you stop, we'll help you to do other stuff.
He had social workers, health care , courts , education communities, youth groups, already & on board waiting as part of the multi part agency initiative.
A workshop was also incorporated into this for prison leavers which taught them new skills and were paid to find jobs. This was a huge success and resulted in knife crime/murder being cut in half.
A missed opportunity?
(Jeth: In terms of the Glasgow success, why do you think that this hasn't been rolled out in England and Wales? This was several years ago because I remember following it in the press here and then...nothing. Is this model still working and reducing violence in Scotland?)
Lisa: I've been wondering about this myself for years. A known solution that worked to reduce knife crime and violent crime. An initiative that could easily have been rolled out across the UK.
I’m not sure why a gang truce has never been attempted here in the UK especially being that it was so successful. I'm going to do further research into this though.
The Public Health Approach
From my understanding though, what we have done here in London is copy the model used by Glasgow. This was known as The Public Health Approach, where instead of treating knife crime as a matter for the police, a holistic and creative approach was used.
The Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) was first set up in Scotland consisting of a team of specialists who would work with the community ,have an understanding about what was happening and take action to prevent crime now and in the future.
They would also be looking into specific areas like who was most likely to offend to effect genuine change & listening to the young people . They set up a young people's action group.
All of this was publicly funded . This meant everyone could concentrate on working together for a common purpose and not having to keep applying for funding.
The Scottish government understood the root causes of the problem & had looked at solutions that would work. This approach takes 10 years to see results so that problems we’re seeing today, would not be a problem in the future.
(Jeth: For further understanding, here is a video of John Carnican from 2012 describing some of his VRU work in Glasgow).
In London…
Mayor Sadiq Khan set up A VRU here in London a few years ago. They have been investing lots into various pilot scheme and local community initiatives.
My concern is that presently this seems to be mainly upstream work to prevent things happening in the future which is great but what about now we need more investment to help keep them alive now.
We have to keep our youth safe on the way to all these initiatives, schemes, events, training sessions and opportunities that the VRU are investing into.
One possible community solution
An idea we put forward to MOPAC (The Mayor's Office for Policing And Crime ) was to have neighbour patrols before & after school times 3-6 in places that school children frequent ie bus stop shops, shopping centres, parks etc.
These patrols would need to be jointly with police, community members and organisations .
To keep our children safe and at the same time build up the trust of the police & everything being over seen by the community.
End of part two
(In part three, we’ll be looking at how knife crime is depicted in the media and why this may not be the full picture of what is going on.)
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It is astonishing that with the success in Glasgow that we have not done the same here in the UK.
Clearly we need more people at ground level who have actual experience of the streets and who understand those caught between the cracks in society in positions of power instead of these suits time and time again failing to do what is Neccesary… I think because they are so disconnected from the rest of us.. it’s too easy to make calls in comfortable rooms around tables looking at people just like them… that or they are allowing this to play out to serve some bigger agenda…
Looking forward to part three!
Respect!