Australia's Violence Crisis: Lessons From Scotland

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. Australia is in the middle of a difficult conversation about violence. From youth crime to knife attacks and domestic violence, politicians, police and communities are all searching for answers. So what if one country has already been through this and found a way to dramatically reduce violent crime? Karyn McCluskey helped lead that transformation as one of the founders of Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit. She helped change Glasgow from one of Europe's most violent cities into an international case study in violence prevention by treating violence as a public health issue and not just a criminal justice problem.
Today, she speaks with Australian True Crime's producer Matthew Tankard to explain what worked, what didn't, and what Australia can learn from Scotland's experience.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

**Karyn McCluskey** (1:13)
We actually started in 2003 and I was head of intelligence analysis. We were made national in 2004 and the next year, we had a big drop in the murder rate. But these are, you can't look at figures like year to year, that's a massive mistake. You have to look at trend lines, because what you want to bring it down is consistently, because crime changes all the time. You form a squad, you put loads of cops out, you do lots of stop search. Crime comes down for a little bit and then it goes back up again because you've not addressed the problem.
All you've done is try and address one of the symptoms.
I joined Strathclyde Police force down in England. I think we'd had about three murders in three years. I'd come back to Scotland after a long time of working away in London and other police services. I was just overwhelmed. It wasn't just somebody would say there's been a murder. Sometimes we'd have three and four on a weekend.
They just thought that was what happened. That was just Glasgow, that was Scotland. We had a level of violence. And people just thought that was, and I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean, that when things happen so frequently, it does become normalized. I used to be a trained nurse originally. I don't think I was a very great nurse, but I trained as a nurse and wait to hang around as an emergency department. And actually you have a great surgeon, actually based in Australia now, who was actually one of our main emergency and medicine consultants, who was based in Glasgow. A man called Michael Sheridan, and he did a really unusual thing. He counted the amount of people who were coming in as a result of violence. And what you found was only 30 percent were reporting to the police.
So regardless of how bad we thought it was, it was actually much worse. And then United Nations came out and said that Scotland was the most violent country in Europe and Glasgow was the most violent city. And so I went away and I took three weeks, and I just wrote a report for the Chief Constable at the time. And what it really said was, despite the best 30 years of policing, we've been fantastic at DetectTown, but actually we've made no difference to trying to prevent this happening in the first place.

**Matthew Tankard** (3:39)
What do you think was unique about Glasgow that made the rate so high compared to the rest of the world?

**Karyn McCluskey** (3:43)
So really interesting. I mean, lots of people have asked me that question. So lots of people will recognize this. Deindustrialization, we used to have massive shipyards, we had lots of employment. That's gone down as we've moved into tech industries and manufacturing's moved elsewhere. So there was unemployment and we've had drugs. All the issues you would probably recognize in lots of the places in Australia and I've been out there, it would feel pretty similar, hopelessness.
We actually had to come up with a term, we called it recreational violence. We had lots of gangs, we had about 3,500 young people, ish youngish, under the age of 25, 26, who were engaged in these gangs and gangs have been around for a long time in Glasgow particularly, really since the 1920s.
And they were just, it wasn't because they were robbing people to get a watch or for money, it was just recreational, that's just what we do.

**Matthew Tankard** (4:47)
Yeah. Do you think it's pretty common worldwide, when you said that only 30% of people report, or is that Glasgow specific?