The head of London’s newly formed violence reduction unit has said Londoners feel powerless about levels of street crime but insisted that increased use of stop and search powers had been successful.

Lib Peck, the former leader of Lambeth council who was appointed to the role in January, made the comments while on a two-day fact-finding trip to Glasgow, visiting some of the Scottish unit’s key projects and meeting senior officials.

Set up in 2005, Glasgow’s VRU famously treated violence as a public health issue and reduced stabbing deaths while unravelling the deeply rooted gang culture in a city which at the time had the second highest murder rate in western Europe.

Responding to the recent wave of violence that left four people dead in the capital, Peck said: “It does mean people feel a bit hopeless about the situation that we’re in and feel incredibly sad and powerless. But what we also know is that we’ve got to do things differently. To that extent the London VRU is copying some of the work that the Glasgow VRU is doing and looking at things in a much longer term perspective.”

Peck said new stop and search powers have been successful after a five-fold increase in their use over the past year.

At the beginning of June, the Metropolitan police deputy commissioner, Sir Steve House, told the London assembly police and crime committee that the number of stop and searches under section 60 powers, which allow the police to search people in a designated area without suspicion, had increased from 1,836 in 2017-18 to 9,599 in 2018-19.

House faced criticism in his previous role at head of Police Scotland in 2015, when figures emerged showing excessive use of informal powers to search people, including tens of thousands of children, without any evidence they had committed a crime.

Independent monitoring has found that stop and search powers disproportionately target black people.

Peck said: “There’s a combination of enforcement as well as long term prevention work that has to go hand in hand. Stop and search has been successful in terms of the numbers of weapons it has revealed, and it is worth noting that violence has started to come down in London not that there’s any complacency around that.”

She added: “I do think there is something around making sure you’ve got the trust of communities who are absolutely critical to successful violence prevention work. And you’ve got to be very aware of the impact of stop and search on those communities”.

The co-founders of Scotland’s VRU have previously described the benefits of their arms-length relationship with politicians, and of being able to start their work away from the media glare.

Quick Guide Knife crime in the UK Show What is the scale of the problem? Police chiefs have described the recent spate of knife crime as ‘a national emergency’. In the first two months of 2019 there were 17 homicides in London alone, where 35% of all knife crimes are committed. The number of NHS England admissions among people aged 10-19 with knife wounds has risen 60% in five years, surpassing 1,000 last year. The number of knife and offensive weapon offences in England and Wales have risen to their highest level for nearly a decade, with the number of cases dealt with by the criminal justice system up by more than a third since 2015. Knife crime-related offences recorded by the police rose by 8% in England and Wales in 2018. Figures on sentences handed out for such crimes, published by the Ministry of Justice, showed there were 22,041 knife and weapon offences formally dealt with by the criminal justice system in the year ending March 2019. This is the highest rate since 2010, when the number was 23,667.

What happens to people caught with knives? In the year ending March 2019, 37% of knife and offensive weapon offences resulted in an immediate custodial sentence, compared with 22% in 2009, when the data was first published. The average length of the custodial sentences rose to the longest in a decade, from 5.5 months to 8.1 months. Are younger people more at risk of being involved in knife crime? The MoJ figures revealed that the number of juvenile offenders convicted or cautioned for possession or threats using a knife or offensive weapon increased by almost half (48%) between the year ending March 2015 and the year ending March 2019. The increase in adult offenders over the same period was smaller, at 31%. However, adult offenders still accounted for 74% of the total increase in cautions and convictions received for those offences in that period. What are the government doing about knife crime? In March 2019 chancellor, Philip Hammond, handed an extra £100m to police forces in England and Wales after a spate of fatal stabbings led to a renewed focus on rising knife crime and police resources. In the same month more than 10,000 knives were seized and 1,372 suspects arrested during a week-long national knife crime crackdown. Officers carried out 3,771 weapons searches, during which 342 knives were found. Another 10,215 were handed in as part of amnesties.

A new Offensive Weapons Act was passed in May 2019, making it illegal to possess dangerous weapons including knuckledusters, zombie knives and death star knives. It also made it a criminal offence to dispatch bladed products sold online without verifying the buyer is over 18.

Accepting that the intensity of public, political and media scrutiny around knife crime in London makes her role very different, Peck said: “It makes it more difficult but I do think it’s all about building confidence in what we’re trying to do. There are huge number of organisations across London doing schemes which are making a positive difference. There is a huge appetite from the public not to see violence become the norm, as there is across the whole of England, it’s not just a London phenomenon.”

Peck’s visit took place as the home secretary, Sajid Javid, announced he was giving £35m from the £100m serious violence fund announced by the government in March to police and crime commissioners in 18 local areas to set up their own local violence reduction units.

Niven Rennie, director of Scotland’s VRU acknowledged that stop and search was “an emotive issue” in London and emphasised the need for local engagement to avoid the situation where “people think they are being searched for the sake of it because they happen to be black”.

He added that a key element of the VRU’s early work in Glasgow was “you can’t have enforcement without search”.

“What I say to Lib and her colleagues is that you have to stop people dying before you can start making improvements, and then prevention comes after that.”

While Scotland’s VRU has no official affiliation with the London unit, its team regularly hosts visits from other parts of the UK and beyond.

Rennie said: “When I go down south I get all the time ‘it’s different down here, it’s drugs and race, but if you raise it up to strategic level it’s poverty and exclusion. All the social factors that you associate with city present in violence. If we get tied up with the differences, we won’t make much progress.”



