How do you halve knife crime? Connecting the dots from policy to the street

Guest Authors: Ali Fraser and Luke Billingham

The Home Office have recently published a new strategy designed to ‘halve knife crime’ over a ten year period. But what does it actually take to achieve this?

In this blog we reflect on a four year study on the public health approach to violence reduction, asking what lessons policymakers, practitioners and communities can learn to inform these long-term efforts.

From tragedy to prevention – Why violence must be treated like a public health issue

The image is grainy. White noise and static. Then, suddenly, CCTV of a Glasgow street flickers into focus. Bathed in pale light, figures are moving quickly. One, clad in tracksuit and cap, cuts a zigzag path through the melee. He throws one punch, then another, and turns to raise his hands in celebration. His knife is visible, reflecting the glare of the streetlight. The second ‘punch’ inflicted a fatal stab-wound to the heart of a passing stranger.

How do we prevent this?

The story of the young man holding the knife – a fourteen year-old known as ‘David’ – is one that is all too common. His early life experiences tell a story of domestic violence and precarious housing. By twelve he was truanting from school, experimenting with drugs and crime.

It is also a story that has itself become a weapon. Footage of the incident, and the life story that led to it, became central to the public communications of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU) in the early 2000s.

Reframing violence

Stories like David’s enabled the SVRU to show how system failure had led to tragic loss of life, implicating – and empowering – a generation of teachers, social workers and health workers to find Davids in their own work, and find ways to intervene, using the language of ‘public health’ and prevention.

The result? Rates of serious violence halved over a ten-year period, from 2005 to 2015, leading to the founding of a further twenty VRUs in England and Wales.

Over the last five years, we have been travelling the country to ask two simple questions: why did this reduction happen, and can it happen again? Although the questions were simple, the answers are more challenging. We argue for the need for a revolution in violence reduction – to build a new movement for change that connects the dots between policy and the street.

We heard about places from Scotland to England and Wales where policymakers, managers and community leaders pulled together to reframe how young people are viewed. Whether through a radical reduction in school exclusions in Glasgow or the embedding of trauma-informed practice across services in Lancashire, we saw examples of people coming together to form new movements for change with a shared interpretation of the problem, drive for change, and belief in collaboration.

Violence reduction requires system-wide change

As we found, system-wide change needs to work both horizontally, between sectors, and vertically, within organisations. And vertical travel isn’t just from the top down but from the bottom up as well. The special sauce, we found, were people that could move between these spaces: boundary spanners that could hold space in both community and policy spaces.

One young man we met embodied this idea to a tee. He was a local organiser, funded by a local VRU, who guided and evaluated strategy for local youth provision. He spoke about driving around the area – his area – to see the summer activities he had helped to fund, and meet the practitioners and the young people involved. It was clear that he would champion the good work he saw, but would also speak up without hesitation if he saw need for improvement. His role blended strategic decision-making, commissioning, and a grounded form of informal inspectorate. He wasn’t an outsider applying interventions but an insider ensuring abstract policies made sense on the ground.

By contrast, we saw other examples where top-down urgency and the need for superficial ‘good news stories’ undermined these kinds of connectedness. Rather than multi-directional movements for change, we heard of policies moving along a vertical one-way street: with youth workers under pressure to provide impressive numbers, press-friendly photos, or ‘shiny’ neat interventions. One youth charity’s director told us that they outright refused to comply with a funder’s monitoring requirements. VRU Directors felt this tension, too. As one told us:

“After about four weeks of existence, a senior stakeholder saw me in a corridor somewhere, and said we need more sparkle, we need more glitz…And it’s trying to kind of resist that, you know, let’s just spend money on a sparkly project that’s going to look good in a newsletter or on Twitter or whatever.”

Within violence reduction policymaking, storytelling can both galvanise movements for effective systemic change, and support the cynical imperative for decision-makers to be ‘seen to be doing something’ about violence. Genuine relational connection can flourish between different layers of policymaking, from senior police leaders to frontline teachers, from youth practitioners to directors of VRUs. But those connections can also become bogged down in accountability and audit culture. As with any movement for change, violence reduction requires deep collaboration, to join the dots between policy and the street, in both directions – and that requires people who can span those boundaries, and prevent stories like David’s being repeated.

Connecting Policy to the Street: What Needs to Happen Next

If the UK is serious about halving knife crime:

We must:

• Treat violence as a preventable public health issue
• Invest in grassroots evaluation not ‘sparkly projects’
• Support cross-sector movements for change
• Empower youth leadership and authentic narratives
• Create space for long-term change, not quick wins

Above all, we need people and systems that can connect policy to lived experience — ensuring that strategies are not just written, but felt where they matter most.