As knife crime rises in England, police look to Glasgow
IN 2005 the World Health Organisation branded Glasgow the murder capital of Europe. The city’s gangs specialised in administering “Glasgow smiles”: cuts at each corner of a victim’s mouth, leaving scars running up their cheeks. But since then, knife crime has plummeted. The number of people admitted to the city’s hospitals for slashes and stab wounds fell by 65% between 2004-05 and 2016-17. These days, the trauma surgeon at Glasgow’s facial-surgery unit has so much spare time that he spends some of it removing wisdom teeth.
Those south of the border are taking a keen interest in Glasgow’s success. Knife crime in England and Wales has risen by 54% in the past three years. The homicide rate is also ticking up, after years of decline. Murders in London are at their highest in more than a decade. Alarmed, police and politicians in England are hoping to copy Scotland’s turnaround.
In the year that the WHO issued its damning verdict on Glasgow, the police there established a Violence...