Karyn McCluskey: How Glasgow Reduced Gang Violence Using Science

[audience applauding]

I first off want to say that this is a story of hope.

I could make this sound really depressing,

and I'm gonna show some pictures.

I will tell you if they're coming up,

if you don't like wounds,

I'm sort of slightly inured to them.

So, first off, I'm gonna tell you

we are at a 42-year low for homicide,

murder, as we say in Scotland,

and it's not low enough.

We've reduced the amount of people coming into A&E

as a result of assault is by 52%,

and it's still not enough.

So we've got far to go so please don't think

that I'm complacent about this.

And I first off want to say I am not a gangbuster.

I seem to have defied some of the media,

because everybody says,

Oh, the woman who took on Glasgow's gangs.

No I didn't.

The one thing that I really didn't want was violence.

I never wanted to meet another murder victim's family.

I really don't, but I will.

I never want to go and see another guy in prison for murder,

who's gonna be there for the next 15 years,

but I will.

I didn't want gangs to be part

of our young people's multiple choices,

but I'm sure they still will.

So, we have much to do.

And it's really interesting,

so let's dispel some myths.

We seem to think that 24-hour news

has sort of invented this.

So this is actually from the Glasgow Evening News,

and you can read it.

It's depressing nowadays to take up one's paper

and read the daily catalog of assaults

and murders with knives, razors, and other lethal weapons.

Slashing and stabbings are becoming so common

that they appear to be part of our modern youths recreation.

That's from 1930.

It's been around for a very long time.

And we had Percy Sillitoe

who was the Chief Constable between the wars.

He then went on to lead MI5.

And we had No Mean City,

which was a really popular book written about the 1930s

about gangs in Glasgow and City of Gangs.

There was a really famous poem about Percy Sillitoe,

because he developed The Untouchables.

They were the group of the biggest, hardest cops.

And they really just went out

and lifted everybody who had a knife,

and you immediately got seven years.

And the poem said

that Sillitoe kicked a razor down the stank,

the drain, and that was the end of the razor gangs.

Well, no it wasn't.

Things didn't just stop, because they never do.

So, 2004 people have mentioned this,

the United Nations had come out and it said that Scotland

was the most violent country in Europe

and Glasgow was the most violent city.

You can imagine that Visit Scotland was bloody delighted.

[audience laughing] You know?

And I never really then got invited

to any of their civic do's.

And it's really interesting, because we were really good.

We are fantastic at detective murders.

We had a 98% detection rate.

Because if you think about it

in the criminal justice solution,

so an offense is committed, we then report it,

We then investigate it,

it's then detected, somebody goes to jail.

That's a criminal justice model.

We've been doing it for hundreds of years.

Really effective.

Filled the jails.

Hasn't prevented anything.

And when I wrote the first report

and I said to the Chief Constable,

You've not really made a great deal of difference

despite the best 30 years of policing

in preventing violence.

Now, he didn't send me to the traffic department,

which is normally where you would get sent.

And he said, Do something different.

So here's the thing, you listen to crime figures,

only 30% of violence is reported to the police.

I spent my life in A&E departments.

This guy's got over the top of his back

Only God can judge me.

That wasn't actually true.

I think he got about six years later on.

So his tattoo perhaps needed a wee bit of revision.

[audience laughing]

Scary photograph.

And we had facial injury.

We have this thing, there's an eponymous thing

called the Glasgow Smile,

where people put a knife up the face.

You'll often see it talked about in some old books.

It's a serious facial injury.

Incredibly, it is catastrophic.

You will suffer 60 years worth of deprivation

if you've got a serious facial injury.

And I mean I go into prisons

and I see hundreds of them.

You'll not get the job that you want.

You'll not get the girlfriend you want.

Because when people look at you,

they will think you're a violent person.

And we had one every six hours, 24 hours a day,

365 days a year.

If you wanted to look at gunshot wounds

you went to South Africa, you went to some of the States.

If you wanted to be a facial surgeon, you came to Scotland.

It's not something that I really particularly

want to be proud of.

That's what it looks like.

That wee boy's 14.

Violence is really, really difficult.

And can I tell you, if you are not motivated

to change it by seeing these things,

then you're probably not grasping the scale of the problem.

And for so many our people, they were excluded,

meaning and purpose.

The people that I support

and the people that I work with

in terms of gangs and violence are hopeless and alienated.

They're not part of the society that you occupy.

They feel no part of it.

They're excluded from schools.

And if you're excluded from society,

you can do almost anything,

so you need to include.

And so we tried to changed the process

so we started to look at violence as a contagious process,

because we've been trying that criminal justice thing

for absolute ages, and it really hadn't worked.

So I want you to spend a wee bit of disbelief

and start to think about how you catch violence,

how you pass it on, then how you start to treat it.

So first off, it is a wicked problem.

People always wanted me to start up here

when I had a homicide,

but actually violence is transmitted through

you're brought up in a violent, angry home

where there's drug addiction, neglect.

There's your parents in prison,

you've got parental ill health, mental health,

and you catch it.

Now, there's a dose-related response,

how often that you are actually exposed to violence

depends on whether you'll pick it up.

And you may be traumatized by it,

but you may not develop it.

And then what happens is you go out in communities

and you'll meet other boys and girls like you.

This is a violence map.

This is our old gang territories.

Some of them have been around since the 1930s.

Sometimes the parents keep it going.

Don't go there, that's a Gallowgate, that's a Toi.

And you'll see that you've got murders

and attempt murders, and it's clustered in areas.

There was quite a lot of people.

When you started to unpick

and started to do some surveillance

and tried to work out the amount of people

that were actually involved in it, there was many.

My name is Legion,

for we are many.

And it starts to become overwhelming.

If you look at some of the paper story... [laughing]

The stories in the papers, you can imagine why people think,

I just don't know where to start.

When we started, I went to the prison service

and I said, I want to do violence reduction,

and they said, It's too big, don't bother.

Because they were right up here.

And I never went back to see them.

Because you only get three choices

if you're gonna try and do something,

you need to lead, you can follow,

you can get out the way.

So, what did we do?

If it's an infection, this is what WHO would do.

If you had measles or you had TB

or you had another disease,

they first interrupt transmission.

How is it transmitted?

Secondly, you change the behavior.

And third, you change the norms

You'll see at the very bottom there,

we wanted Scotland to be the safest country in the world.

And I still do, and I've worked relentlessly on it

for the last 15 years.

So I'm just gonna give you a quick account.

I'm gonna make this sound really simple.

You can speak to me later,

and I'll tell you how complex it is.

So firstly, you interrupt a transmission.

Parenting.

I was in the police for a very long time.

I trained as a forensic psychologist,

and I talk about parenting constantly.

It's as close as it gets to being magic

without being magic to have a good parent.

Keeping kids in school.

One more kid in school is one less kid you'll have in jail.

And I speak to teachers frequently

about having zero exclusion.

We try and break the cycle, we interrupt a transmission.

We focus on the teachable moments,

the moments when you are motivated to change your behavior.

I always used to say it was the 1st of January

when I was trying to get the zip up in my skirt,

and I thought I needed to get back out running.

People are motivated to change their behavior

at a whole range of times,

when their children are born,

when they're injured, often in a dental chair.

If I punch you in the face,

which I'm not going to, 'cause I'm violent reduction,

you're most likely to lose your teeth.

You can't put up with dental pain.

So what we used to do

is we used to intervene in dentist chairs.

This isn't an injury I would normally see in my chair.

You're in a safe place.

We got everybody to intervene.

These are my navigators.

They're usually people who've got lived experience

in the justice system, and they work in our hospitals.

I used to do it, but I wasn't very good at it.

I used to stand at the bottom of people's beds

when they've been stabbed, usually in the buttock,

and I used to say, This isn't working out

too well for you here, big man.

Are you thinking about changing?

They intervene all the time.

They try and interrupt,

because what was happening was people were on their phone

and they were plotting the revenge tit-for-tat violence.

And so we interrupt the cycle of violence,

interrupted transmission.

This is a bit old, R U IN A GANG?

You can tell it's slightly dated,

but then we started to look at the gangs,

and we had three and a half thousand people

who were involved.

So we started to get them into a courtroom

We had what was called a [indistinct].

We did loads and loads of work

to try and work out who was involved.

We then got them into a courtroom,

we got them in from the jails,

and we had hundreds of them in the jails,

and you could tell they were all just saying,

What's going on here?

We searched people as we're coming in.

And we had the Chief Constable who stood up and he said,

and we flashed their pictures around the room,

and he said, That's it.

As of 12 o'clock tonight, it stops.

The next one of you commits an offense

we're gonna take out your whole group.

Now, we couldn't actually do it, but it was a good bluff.

And you could see people there,

you know, like, 'cause they're there,

and you're the police and they're like, Come ahead.

You know that, because you've got a common enemy.

And then we got parents, we got a parent in

of a murder victim who started to talk about,

she went in and she talked about going in to see

her boy's room who died previously,

and she said, And I'll never go over it.

And at that point I suddenly realized

that actually all these young men

who were very violent, loved their mothers.

'Cause you could see them sniffing and crying.

And then we had a surgeon who stood up,

and he was an expert in maxillofacial surgery,

and he used to fix baby's cleft palettes.

And then he started to show the wounds,

and you just seen some of them,

they're actually really nice wounds.

They're very clean,

and they've all been cleaned up.

And they started to show some of the wounds,

and he said, See, when you get injured,

you go right to the very top of the queue.

So all my other babies that I'm tryin' to fix up,

they go at the very end.

So I've got a waitin' list for babies with cleft palates.

And then we gave them an option.

We said, If you want out,

if you want out, you can phone us 24 hours a day,

seven days a week, we'll be out.

We'll have a plan for you.

We'll come back again and again and again.

Because not everybody succeeded the first time.

And it was really interesting when we did it the first time,

I actually thought we'd get nobody,

and we were overwhelmed.

That lifestyle is awful.

That lifestyle is dreadful.

Imagine going out every single day

and being so stressed that you think you might get stabbed,

that you might never come home.

You lead lives of chronic stress.

For those that have been in this lifestyle a very long way,

they will become chronically ill.

They release cortisol, the stress hormone, consistently.

Starts to lead to an inflammatory process in your body

and you can C-reactive protein,

which makes the lumen over your arteries sticky.

It's why we die young in Scotland.

Not just because of the weather.

And then what you have to do

is you have to create a movement.

I speak to everybody.

I'm speaking to you.

You have to be part of this.

I get fire officers to do it.

I get dentists to do it.

I speak to faith groups.

I speak to everybody, and I say, Do something.

Because no one's safe until everybody's safe,

so you have to do something.

And the standard you walk by in the society

is a standard that you accept.

And we have got tens of thousands of people who do stuff.

Don't think that it's me that's done it.

I've got early years people.

I've got teachers who've done the most spectacular things.

I've got dads and I've got moms

and I've got communities and I've got politicians,

and it is a movement that I'm incredibly proud of,

of people that have just done the most extraordinary things.

But for the creation of health,

because actually what I'm talking about is wellbeing.

You need your life to be predictable,

understandable, and manageable,

and to have a sense of hope.

I'm a purveyor of hope.

I always think I'm glass half full.

And if you don't have it, your life will become,

you'll have chronic stress

so you all got up today, you all had clean clothes,

you knew you were coming here.

You had something to do with your life.

And that's what we need to do for lots of people,

because so many of the people that I support

don't have anything.

Their lives are chaotic.

So we try and get them into a job.

I suddenly realized when I put this photo up

that I've actually done a picture

at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo

where all my ex-gang members are dressed up

as members of Culloden,

and we've given them wooden swords,

but it's not the right thing.

The best way to stop a gun or a gang or a knife is a job

of people who are excluded from work.

And by getting them into work,

it has a halo effect in the house.

It affects not only their lives

but the lives of their family

and the lives of the community,

and in so doing, it changes a country.

Somebody once asked me, Tell me the one thing

that I should do to reduce violence.

And I said, Had I known the one thing to do

to reduce violence I'da done it 15 years ago

and then ridden off into the sunset and said,

'That's it fixed.'

There is no one thing.

And I came across this in The New Yorker recently,

and it probably explains everything

that I try and do around treating violence as a disease.

And he says, Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures.

Most of the time in the history of medicine,

the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer

and get people to wash their hands.

Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges

is usually the best thing to do.

Keep chipping away patiently

and eventually you get to its heart.

To read the literature on crime before it dropped

was to see a dystopian despair.

You had to end poverty, eradicate the ghettos,

or declare war on the broken family.

The truth is a series of small actions and events

ended up eliminating a problem

that seemed to hang over everything.

There was no medical cure,

just an intercession of a thousand small sanities.

Thanks very much.

[audience applauding]