A healthy approach to reducing crime
Is violent crime a disease that should be treated as a public health matter to stop it spreading and infecting others? As we report today, Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, is planning to make this approach the centrepiece of a new drive to reduce the number of stabbings and shootings blighting some of our inner cities.
Police officers, teachers, social service workers and council officials would be under a new legal duty to adopt the policy backed by a £200 million fund aimed primarily at diverting children aged between 10 and 14 away from gangs.
Many people will be tempted to see this as another example of phoney science and an abrogation of personal responsibility for criminal actions. Blaming social conditions for violent offending risks removing any notion of individual culpability deserving of punishment. Moreover, there is a danger that if violence is seen as a disease the police will take that as a further signal to do even less on the streets and leave it to public health officials.
But while we are right to be sceptical, there is some evidence that this approach can pay dividends. It has been tried for 20 years or more in Chicago, helping to cut the appalling murder rate there, though it still remains far higher than anything in Britain.
Closer to home, a violence reduction unit using a public health approach has operated in Glasgow since 2005 and is credited with significant falls in stabbings. Previously identified by the World Health Organisation as one of Europe’s most violent cities, Glasgow has seen violent crime halved. The public health model is based on a presumption that most people involved in serious youth violence have a history of trauma and that police tactics – from stop and search to stiffer sentences – are only part of the solution.
It seeks to approach youth violence with the same preventative and all-encompassing care usually deployed to contain and disrupt the outbreak of an epidemic like cholera or HIV. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, has recently announced a similar idea for the capital.
If there is a chance that this approach can work then it should be tried, given that more than 100 young people have died in London alone this year in gang-related violence. But it must go hand-inglove with tough law enforcement. There is always a danger that when there are two stools, public policy falls between them.