In 2018, London faced a heartbreaking crisis.
National cuts to services designed to keep young people safe and supported had played their part in rising crime in London and across the country.
For too long, the national conversation around knife crime had been dominated by a mistaken assumption that the only way out of the crisis was to arrest our way out of violence.
At the start of 2019, he set up London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), charged with taking a public health approach to tackling knife crime and violence.
The essence of the approach is that to stop violence, you have to prevent it from happening in the first place.
The then Government followed the Mayor’s lead, setting up 19 other Violence Reduction Units across the country.
It was bold because the call from some was centred on more police and solely an enforcement approach, but Sadiq recognised prevention was equally important.
You need to be both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.
Mayor Sadiq Khan and Violence Reduction Unit director Lib Peck
PA
What London’s VRU has done in just over seven years has been to coordinate and work in partnership across the capital, bringing together health, education, community organisations and the police, mainstreaming prevention, taking a neighbourhood approach and critically always working with young people.
What does that look like?
We have invested in a mix of interventions, diversionary activities and targeted support with short and longer-term outcomes.
That means working to keep young people in school, so they aren’t vulnerable to exploitation by criminal gangs, creating positive opportunities and delivering after-school diversionary work and funding for youth clubs to keep them safe, as well as targeted interventions for those at the greatest risk.
For example, we’ve funded skilled youth workers to take young people off the streets and away from the grip of gangs.
They’ll also work with young people in a police cell or a hospital bed, preventing retaliation, reoffending and breaking the cycle of violence.
By the end of this month, the VRU will have delivered one million targeted interventions and positive opportunities for Londoners with more than three quarters aimed at young people.
And the latest data shows the difference this work is making. Comparing 2018, with now, the number of young people admitted to hospital for knife assault has more than halved.
There were also 12,500 fewer victims of violence in those seven years, while knife crime has fallen and continues to show a downward trend with a 10 per cent reduction in the last 12 months.
Clearly, one violent incident is one too many and there isn’t any room for complacency when it comes to violence.
But progress is being made and prevention, the work of the VRU and the coalition of youth workers, mentors, teachers and those working every day with young people, is having a meaningful and positive impact. London is demonstrating what is possible when you treat violence as preventable rather than an inevitable.
We are building a safer city for everyone – and now there are opportunities for the Government to learn from our approach to prevent young people from taking a wrong turn in life and falling into violence and the criminal justice system.