One day in July 1976, ten-year-old Eddie Gorman begged his dad to take him and his brother fishing in their small boat. They went out too far, the boat overturned, and they were thrown into the cold Irish Sea, off the Mull of Kintyre. The brothers made it to shore. Their father didn’t.
Gorman blamed himself for the loss of his father, and as he grew older the grief, rage and guilt boiled over. He began to get into fights in his hometown of Irvine, in Ayrshire – a former shipbuilding town fallen on hard times – and hang around with the wrong crowd. He was self-medicating with cannabis to numb the pain, and amphetamines to build his confidence.
Throughout his teens and his twenties, Gorman made money by dealing. And in 1992 he was found guilty of possession of drugs with intent to supply – the first of three sentences that would see him serve almost 18 years in prison. On his first day in maximum-security Whitemoor prison, designed for violent criminals, the biggest man he’d ever seen came into his cell with a welcoming gift – a bag of heroin from an old friend incarcerated in the same jail. It was the first time Gorman had tried the drug. As he slipped into a state of bliss he thought: five years … no problem. For the first time he could remember, he relaxed.
He came out of Whitemoor with a heroin habit. That’s when the serious crime started, culminating in a series of armed robberies that put him inside again. Serving the final weeks of that 18-year stretch, he had a moment of clarity: if he reoffended, he would spend the rest of his life in jail. He was released in 2009, at the age of 44, and wanted to start a new life. But his years inside were the only work experience he had to show employers. He started to worry about slipping back into his old ways. Indeed, many like him – tough upbringing, chaotic family, heartbreaking events, poor male role models – end up in prison, or dead. But Gorman was offered a second chance.
In 2014, during the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, he joined a police-run programme called Braveheart. Gorman was part of a team of ex-offenders – many with drug and alcohol issues – whose job was to keep games volunteers supplied with maps, water, foam fingers. Participating meant employment training and a bit of extra money on top of his benefits.
The Games finished, but Braveheart carried on – and Gorman was given a role as a mentor, holding “morning check-ins”: every day, as the ex-offenders stood in a circle, Gorman asked each one in turn to talk about the issues they were facing at home and how they were feeling that day.
“I would be there all the time,” he explains. “Showing them consistency, reliability and a good work ethic, teaching them how to behave in a work environment.” It was abstinence-based: addiction was tackled first, then 24/7 support with psychotherapists. “Some of the guys would have anger management problems,” Gorman recalls. “When you experience trauma at a young age you get fixed at that age, so you self-medicate early and you’re emotionally stunted. You might be 25 but you have the emotions of an 11-year-old kid. For most of them I was the first positive male role model they’d had in their lives.”
To people like Gorman, Braveheart was a lifesaver. It was part of an initiative run by a small group of police officers, doctors and psychologists at the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit. The group approached crime not as a law and order crisis, but as a health epidemic, a contagious disease. And Braveheart was the highly efficacious vaccine. In 2004 Scotland had the second highest murder rate in western Europe. In 2017, of the 35 children and teenagers killed with knives in Britain not one was in Scotland – and this was the worst year for such deaths in England and Wales in a decade.
The Violence Reduction Unit exists because its founder, Karyn McCluskey, thought violence could be cured. In August 2018, McCluskey is sitting in her office in St Andrew’s House, home of the Scottish government – an art deco monolith that broods over Edinburgh from Calton Hill.
McCluskey grew up the eldest of three sisters in a council house in Redding, a former pit village near Falkirk. She was a shy teenager who wanted to travel the world, but her family didn’t have the money, so she trained as a nurse and worked in emergency. She had one of her front teeth knocked out by a drunk patient with a bottle. “You see people at their weakest moments in A&E, whether you’re holding somebody’s hand when they’re dying, or violence and alcohol come in,” she reflects.
On the day she qualified, she left for Northern Ireland for a degree in psychology, focusing on terrorism. It was the late 80s and the Troubles showed no signs of abating. On nights out in Belfast McCluskey would hear explosions in the distance.
After graduating, she worked in Tanzania as a medical officer, returning for a masters in offender profiling, taught by the FBI. She was in a class of police officers and psychologists, and fascinated by group dynamics, whether in football or in prison. She studied armed robbery teams, interviewing prisoners about how they identified targets and established different roles within the team.
At the end of a romance, McCluskey discovered that she was pregnant. In 2003, as a single mother with a two-year-old daughter, she took a job with Strathclyde Police, to set up a unit that would use a new weapon to fight crime – data. Her role was to implement the National Intelligence Model, searching for links between, say, a series of burglaries with the same modus operandi and mapping crime hotspots across the city.
She was stunned by what she found. “I’d been working for West Mercia and we did three or four murders in a couple of years. I came to Strathclyde and it was three or four on an average weekend,” she says. “The investigations were exceptional, and we were solving 98 per cent of them, but people were still dying.”
Glasgow had the highest murder rate of any western European city: 63 victims per million compared with 62 for Belfast, 27 for London, and 22 for the rest of Scotland. Later in 2003, she took three weeks’ holiday and spent her time talking to doctors in Glasgow Royal Infirmary’s emergency department.
“If you want to know about levels of violence, speak to someone in an emergency department, they’ve seen it all,” she explains. “The unit had done more open-heart surgery for stab wounds than any other hospital.” Among the most common cases were victims of a Glasgow smile – slashing someone from the corner of the mouth up to their ear so that when they scream they make the wound worse. The emergency doctors were seeing one and a half thousand infamous Glasgow smiles a year: one every six hours.
“There were kids as young as 14 scarred like that,” she explains. “Their life is ruined. They’re seen as violent, they won’t get the girlfriend they want, the job that they want. They’ve got a life of deprivation ahead.” And violence was breeding violence. McCluskey noticed that the waiting room was often tense, full of young men waiting for their injured friends and planning revenge. The staff told her that only 30 per cent of violent incidents were reported. “Crime figures up 2 per cent means nothing if you don’t know about 70 per cent of the crime,” she says.
McCluskey wrote a report based on her observations and gave it to Strathclyde Chief Constable Willie Rae. The police were good at detecting crime, she concluded, but in the previous 30 years they had made no difference to the number of violent crimes. They needed to come up with a new strategy that focused on violent-crime prevention. Rae agreed and asked McCluskey and Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan to form a special unit and come up with a solution.
“We thought of calling it the Violence Eradication Unit because we absolutely believed we could do this, but we decided on more modest aims,” she says. “We were in the police but on the margins. We had some funding and they would let us innovate, but if we failed it wouldn’t cause angry headlines.” Instead, they called it the Strathclyde Violence Reduction Unit, or SVRU. They started by studying hospital data and researching theories of violence. By then, McCluskey was already thinking of crime as problem of public health. It was an epidemic that needed to be eradicated. The question was how.
In 1836 John Snow, the son of a York labourer, moved to London to train to be a surgeon. At the time doctors were taught miasma theory, which held that cholera and bubonic plague were caused by a noxious form of “bad air”. Snow was never convinced and, in August 1854, after investigating a cholera outbreak in Soho, he was able to discredit the theory. He plotted cases of the disease on a map of the area and identified a contaminated water pump in Broadwick Street as the source. He persuaded the local council to remove the handle of the pump, and cases immediately diminished.
Snow’s research into the cholera outbreak was the first ever study in epidemiology, a new science that linked disease and geography. Today mapping remains the first step in any epidemiological study. Public health teams then deploy primary, secondary and tertiary prevention. Primary – like measles vaccination or ensuring a clean water supply – reduces the risk of exposure. Secondary consists of screening programmes that detect early signs of the disease. Tertiary covers the tailend of clinical treatment: rehabilitation, aftercare and the support necessary to minimise the impact and prevent recurrence of the disease.
In the 1980s Gary Slutkin, an American epidemiologist in Somalia, was working to contain tuberculosis and cholera in refugee camps. Having mapped an outbreak, he tried to change people’s behaviour and reduce the chances of infection through education. “The most effective people in changing behaviours around HIV/Aids have been sex workers,” he explains. “Teaching mothers about breastfeeding was best done by other mothers.”
Slutkin returned to Chicago in the late 1990s, just as Harvard University researcher David M Kennedy founded Operation Ceasefire in an attempt to reduce soaring gun crime in Boston – and the World Health Organisation first defined violence as a public health problem. Officials at the WHO began drawing up guidelines, renaming the three levels of prevention: upfront (primary), targeting socio-economic deprivation and exposure to family violence; in the thick (secondary), tackling symptoms like aggressive or antisocial behaviour and gang membership; and aftermath (tertiary), focusing on long-term responses to deal with the consequences of violence and preventing it.
In Boston, Kennedy’s team invented the “call-in”: known gang members were invited to a face-to-face meeting with law enforcement teams who offered a credible, moral message against violence. Slutkin, however, thought law enforcement might be part of the problem. “They tried police responses to Ebola and it spread,” he points out. “It wasn't until there were health workers who could talk to people on why not to touch the person who is sick, how to bury safely, that the disease could be controlled.”
In 2000 he founded CeaseFire – now known as Cure Violence – with a three-pronged health approach: detection/interruption of planned violent activity; behaviour change in high-risk individuals; and shifting community norms. He trained and deployed “violence interrupters”, often former gang members and offenders, to mitigate conflict before it turns violent.
In Scotland McCluskey and Carnochan had reached similar conclusions. “Here’s the thing about criminal justice,” McCluskey explains. “An offence is committed, I investigate it, catch somebody, go to court and there’s an outcome. But I’m waiting for the offence to happen. If health did that with measles, we’d wait until you caught measles and then we’d lock you up until you died, or it went away. The epidemiology approach is to work out who’s at risk and stop them catching it.”
It was only later, in 2006, at a police chiefs conference in Boston, that they met David Kennedy. “The context in the US looked different – mainly African American men – but they were the same as the Glaswegians. They had no direction, no role models, and were growing up in poverty with hopelessness and alienation.”
Initially, the SVRU’s strategy was a combination of Kennedy’s call-in intervention with Slutkin’s violence-interrupting approach. The key difference was a long-term view. Their mapping of violent crime had identified the source of the problem in experiences such as abuse, neglect or violence in a child’s early years – the Broadwick Street pump of violent crime. “From a forensic developmental perspective, complex trauma during childhood, especially with the high-risk kids suffering attachment issues or early-years trauma, is creating patient zero,” says Lorraine Johnstone, clinical and forensic psychologist at the University of Strathclyde. “They’ve always known violence as a way of life or configured it as a key element in relationships. Interrupting may help many kids, but for those whose family situation is too chaotic, something dramatic is needed.”
The unit started working with health workers and teachers at primary and secondary schools in Glasgow’s crime-ridden East End to identify kids in trouble and intervene. They’d host pizza evenings for parents and pupils, and awaydays to a police college in the countryside, putting officers in the roughest schools. Their mission was not to frisk kids but to identify with them – to build relationships and trust, so that law enforcement was not seen as the enemy.
For school interventions, the unit adapted the US Mentors in Violence Prevention programme. Police officers would visit schools and identify influencers. “Usually the best ones are the cool kids who’d never volunteer for anything,” says Graham Goulden, a former police officer working with the unit. They would then train these kids in spotting potential problems, identifying allies and preventing violence with a variety of strategies: change the subject, intervene in the conversation, and talk to an adult you can trust.
By then, the SRVU researcher Will Linden had begun contacting Glasgow’s gangs to draw an accurate map of gang violence. He met known gang members, talked to kids and teachers, met ex-offenders. “If your disease is knife crime, you do cluster-mapping to identify where the crimes and the individuals carrying knives are,” he explains. “You can then do one of two things: the police will say we are going to round up all those people and arrest them; the public health response would be about identifying why those young people are choosing to pick up a knife in the first place. We did both.”
In October 2008, the SVRU launched the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence – CIRV – with a series of gang call-ins. The first took place in Glasgow’s Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Court, a concrete bunker on the banks of the river Clyde, where 120 gang members were herded in by police wearing full riot gear. A police helicopter hovered noisily and police boats patrolled the river. The gang members crammed into a brightly lit courtroom, to be confronted by a slideshow of CCTV images of their own faces.
Willie Rae stood up and said: “I don’t want to go to your mum’s door and tell her you’ve just been stabbed or tell her I’ve just arrested you for murder. This has to stop now. We don’t want to arrest you. We want you to live. So as of tonight, the next time one of you commits an offence I’m going to take out your whole gang.”
Officers, experts, ordinary citizens and relatives of criminals and victims spoke. Mark Devlin, a maxillofacial surgeon and A&E consultant, explained the problems of dealing with victims who had had their faces slashed open. “When you guys come in like this you go to the top of the queue, so now I can’t fix babies because I’m fixing you,” he said.
He was followed by a mother who told how her 13-year-old son was set upon by a gang and attacked with machetes. The injuries he sustained to his face were so severe that he was unrecognisable when she visited him in hospital.
“You could’ve heard a pin drop,” McCluskey recalls. “They don’t love themselves, don’t love a lot of people, but they really love their mums. She’s the only one who takes herself on a bus 60 miles to go and visit them in the jail, and the only one who keeps on visiting them.”
Then McCluskey told them there was a way out. “Here’s a number, you can call it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we’ll have somebody out to you within 24 hours and we’ll have a plan for you within seven days,” she promised.
For those who phoned, someone from the SVRU would do an assessment: are they in danger? Do we need to get them rehoused? Are they in education? Do they have a job? “I say shut your eyes and tell me what is your definition of success,” McCluskey explains. “Then we designed something bespoke for them.”
However, the call-ins had barely started when the plan seemed on the verge of collapse. The force had lined up hundreds of local businesses to help gang members and ex-offenders find work. “I’m evidence-based and all the evidence shows stable employment is the best way to get people out of criminality,” says McCluskey. But in September 2008, as CIRV prepared to launch, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, prompting the financial crash. Glasgow’s business leaders decided that taking on high-risk employees could wait.
She came across Homeboy Industries, a youth programme founded in LA’s Boyle Heights by a Jesuit priest, Father Greg Boyle. In 1992 Boyle had converted an abandoned warehouse into a bakery, employing former gang members to make tortillas and bread, and providing mentoring and psychotherapy. McCluskey got in touch. In 2013 Boyle visited Glasgow and, while touring rough estates, said: “Man, you guys look poor.” On his advice, McCluskey recruited Inspector Iain Murray to set up a police-run employment programme called Braveheart Industries. “Karyn saw austerity extending beyond 2020 and decided we needed to look at something to fill the gap,” Murray says. “One of the key reasons violence survives and spreads is poverty and hopelessness. If we didn’t treat that, change wouldn’t happen.”
Murray’s pilot project took six of the toughest repeat offenders he could find. “Convicted but with the conviction to change,” he says. “They’d been drug addicted, workless, hopeless, and it had to be the six toughest, to build credibility.”
He secured them work as stagehands at the 2012 Royal Military Tattoo in Edinburgh Castle, embedding them with the military for around a month to help out behind the scenes. They had to stay sober and work hard. “These are people who have never had a job and possibly come from three or four generations of worklessness,” he explains. “We were stabilising their lives because it’s hard to hold down a job in chaos. We’d get them off drugs, off alcohol, sort out their housing and their relationship issues, and mentor them into someone with a stable life who can deal with conflict, has a support system and turns up to work on time.”
He did it again in 2013. Then the Scottish government asked him to scale up to 30 individuals for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. In November 2015 the SVRU launched the Navigator programme, in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary A&E. Navigators wore pink T-shirts to appear non-threatening, and be easily recognised by inebriated people. They intervened when victims presented at A&E, what McClusky calls “a reachable moment”. Four ex-offenders, two male and two female, watched for victims of slashings and stabbings, or domestic abuse. They’d try an intervention – “This isn’t working out for you. How can we stop this? What do you need?” – explain their own experiences and sell the project. “What just happened to you is not my concern, I’m not the police or medical staff. My job is to help you stop this. I guarantee to contact you within 24 hours, and I will make sure you have help from the relevant services.” The programme saw 270 people at the Glasgow Royal in the first year, and 199 accepted support – an engagement rate of 74 per cent.
In November 2016 Braveheart Industries became Street & Arrow, an upmarket food shop in an airstream trailer in Glasgow’s wealthy West End. In 2018 Street & Arrow opened a café at Glasgow Dental Hospital; another project supplied a construction site with 700 builders. By the end of 2018, there were due to be five self-sustaining social enterprises. “The public are not keen on helping bad people – but we’re keeping everyone safe,” Murray says. “If you can find the toughest, meanest offenders and get them working at a good job, it’s much easier to help others into work.”
In 2004, Glasgow had six times more gangs than London. The CIRV call-ins ran from 2008 to 2012. By 2015, according to Glasgow Council figures, violent city-centre incidents, once common, had all but disappeared. Since the launch of the SVRU, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60 per cent – and the number of facial trauma patients in the city’s hospitals has halved.
The SVRU’s results have inspired similar projects in police forces across the UK. London’s mayor, Sadiq Kahn, launched a London Violence Reduction Unit in September, vowing to learn the lessons of Glasgow and treat violence as a public health issue, allocating £500,000 for the new service. “The work of the violence reduction unit will not deliver results overnight,” he said at the launch. “The causes of violent crime are many years in the making and the solutions will take time.”
McCluskey left the SVRU in 2016 to set up Community Justice Scotland – a government organisation with the mandate of reducing offending – but the unit’s work continues. In June 2018 the Navigators programme was rolled out to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and Crosshouse Hospital in South Ayrshire.
And this year Eddie Gorman became a Navigator. He recalls one of the boys who was accepted into the programme, Callum, now a mentor himself. Gorman first met him in A&E. Callum was coming from a violent lifestyle, using alcohol to cope with the past, just like Gorman once did. “They have this hard-man mask but they’re scared young boys who grow into scared young men,” Gorman says. “They’ve never spoken to anybody who understands their lifestyle and come out the other side of it. We’re creating hope.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
