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Lewis Dunne, Sam Cook and Jordan Campbell are just three of the young men and boys who have lost their lives to meaningless flashes of violence in recent years.

The motives for their murders were blurry, and their killers all lived lives defined by violence, drugs and a lack of engagement with society.

Lewis, 16, was killed by a single shotgun blast as he walked along a dark canal towpath in Eldonian Village, in a case of apparent mistaken identity after a series of petty clashes between low-level street gangs.

Sam, out celebrating his 21st birthday, was stabbed in the heart by young but prolific criminal Carl Madigan, over little more than a brief scuffle on a city centre nightclub dance-floor.

Jordan, 17, was subjected to a ferocious and unprovoked knife attack at a New Year's Eve party in St Helens by three cocaine-fuelled men, including his own cousin Ruben Hoather, who had only been released from prison that day.

Merseyside Police duly investigated each death, the Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted each case and the courts have sentenced the killers to a combined hundreds of years in prison.

But that is only a crumb of comfort to families left wondering why their loved ones were taken away in such horrific circumstances.

The creeping rise of knife crime

Frightening police figures reveal that between 2013 and 2018 the number of knife or blade related offences in Merseyside rocketed by 93%, from 612 to 1,181.

Gun crime has been more up and down, but in the last week alone there have been shootings in Walton, Dingle and Birkenhead and Merseyside Police are still investigating a series of unsolved gun-murders.

The force has been working to tackle knife crime and serious violence by cracking down on gangs with initiatives like Operation Target, and an increase in Stop and Search tactics.

But this is considered by some as a short term approach, and police, politicians and health officials have been scrabbling in frustration for an answer to a formidably complex question, often under the strain of enormous budget cuts imposed by central government.

Since 2010, Merseyside Police has had £110million slashed from is budget leading to the loss of more than 1,600 officers and staff.

However it may surprise some that a low cost way of tackling violence in troubled cities - with proven, remarkable results - has been trumpeted in public health circles for many years.

As early as 2002, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released a report recommending that violence be treated as a public health issue rather than simply a matter of law and order.

Glasgow, Cali in Colombia, and Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles in America have all seen extraordinary results from treating violence "like a disease".

According to Jane Kennedy, Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), the county can no longer ignore such dramatic results and the force now has £3.37million in Home Office funding to establish its own so called Violence Reduction Unit.

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

The plan is to not simply focus on suppressing violence through arrests and gang-busting measures, but to try address societal problems including poverty, mental ill-health, education, issues of addiction and lack of opportunity.

Ms Kennedy told the ECHO: "My intention is to demonstrate that this approach works to the point that everybody on Merseyside agrees to do it whatever government we have or whatever funding we have.

"In the long term it will save money and it will save lives. It will stop the devastation of families, and because it works, we have to do it."

In the main they will be taking inspiration from the remarkable transformation north of the border.

Murder capital of Europe

Back in 2005, Glasgow was dubbed the 'Murder Capital of Europe' thanks to a deadly wave of violence fuelled by territorial gangs and major issues with drugs and alcohol.

That same year, a United Nations (UN) report dubbed Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, although Scottish police and politicians criticised its findings.

Police in the city were wearily familiar with a depressing cycle of highly publicised crackdowns on issues like knife crime, only for violent attacks to spike again once the latest initiative ended.

Niven Rennie, then a chief superintendent in Strathclyde Police, was one of several Scottish officials who realised it was time to try something new.

(Image: Daily Record)

That year the force established the now acclaimed Scotland Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU) a journey which has helped slash Glasgow's murder rate by a staggering 60% in a decade.

Mr Rennie is now retired from the force but is the SVRU's director.

He told the ECHO: "In 2005 there were 137 homicides in Scotland and over 50% of them were in Glasgow. At that time we got the unfortunate title of murder capital of Europe.

"It had been going on for generations and it got to the stage where we had had enough and wanted to do something differently.

"The VRU was the result of that. We had been doing enforcement and weapons campaigns but we found as soon as they came out of prison they just picked up those weapons again."

"Violence is preventable, not inevitable"

As a former police officer, Mr Rennie knows what he is talking about when he says: "You cannot arrest your way out of this problem."

His unit, based in what is now Police Scotland, works with the philosophy that "violence is preventable, not inevitable" and has forged partnerships with schools, hospitals, social workers and charities.

One element of the project involved "calling in" gang members to talk about their lifestyles and to diffuse bubbling tensions before they could explode.

It was based largely on work in American cities plagued by gang violence including Chicago and Boston, where trained "interrupters" with close ties to the community try and intervene before simmering feuds erupt in gun violence.

(Image: Katie Collins/PA Wire)

Mr Rennie said the programme has shown remarkable results.

He said: "We found a lot of people involved in violence didn't want to be...

"Before we had a major problem with territorial gangs in Scotland, but [the gang call in] completely broke that. Glasgow never had the same problem."

Other schemes include Street and Arrow, a street food van which gives former offenders a job for a year and offers them support and training so they can move on to further employment.

Medics Against Violence, set up by three surgeons sick of dealing with the devastation of knife crime and other violent attacks, sends its volunteers to schools to advise children how to stay out of violent situations.

VRU staff also work in local A&E departments to speak to victims of violence, often seeking to persuade gang members to avoid a cycle of revenge and engage with drug or alcohol services.

Mr Rennie says tackling the problem with a public health model is a cost effective way of driving down violence - and the VRU has an annual budget of around £1.3million - less than the cost of many major murder investigations.

We are the 99% This campaign hopes to build on the success of other anti-knife crime initiatives by looking at how to reduce the misery caused by blades in Liverpool's clubland. Although the safety of our nightlife is nationally recognised, knife crime is still causing too much tragedy. Since October 2017 there have been two fatal stabbings in the city centre - those of Sam Cook and Fatah Warsame - and a host of other shocking incidents involving bladed weapons. Now John Hughes, one of clubland's most influential figures, is calling on the 99% of law-abiding people in this city to ramp up the pressure on loved ones they fear could be carrying knives. He is also calling for city centre banning orders, which could be issued to anyone caught carrying a knife in town, and controlled zones - where those entering party hotspots are checked for weapons outside clubs. His work seeks to build on that of the landmark #NoMoreKnives campaign and others that are already making a difference in Liverpool.

But he accepts populist political rhetoric on cracking down on crime may have distracted from the model taking hold in England.

He said: "We just continually get the message out there and I think it's largely heard in Scotland. I'm not sure England has got to that stage.

"People keep saying the answer is building bigger prisons and locking more people up. But if that was the answer America would be the safest country in the World and it's clearly not.

"People talk about stop and search and there is clearly a place for that when people are losing their lives, but the way we look at it is if someone is carrying a knife there has already been an opportunity missed."

The Cali cure

Even before Glasgow, forward thinking public officials across the world had noticed the similarities between outbreaks of disease and outbreaks of violence.

Professor John Ashton, a former regional director of public health and now acting as advisor to the Merseyside PCC's office to set up the VRU, said the force would be consulting with Dr Alberto Concha-Eastman, a public health official from Cali, next month.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Dr Concha-Eastman worked with the city mayor, fellow public health official Rodrigo Guerrero, to tackle the chilling murder rate caused largely by violence linked to cocaine trafficking cartels.

While Glasgow was struggling with a murder rate higher than anywhere in Europe, back in 1995 the number of slayings in Cali was close to the highest in the world - with close to 1,000 drug related murders annually and a ratio of 100 homicides per 100,000 of the population.

By 2018 this had fallen to 47.3 murders per 100,000 residents.

Dr Concha-Eastman and his team looked at where violence was taking place and introduced interventions including restriction of alcohol sales and access to weapons, increased police surveillance and enforcement using 24 hour courts.

This was combined with programmes to improve access to education and employment and improve social mobility.

Prof. Ashton told the ECHO: "The way public health people work is to analyse the data and produce maps and look at distribution where things are happening in terms of time and place and the people who are affected.

"That's what they did in Cali...

"They looked at the things the government have to do, like education, jobs and opportunities, and there's also things on an organisational level; what the schools need to do, what the health service needs to do, what the police and the churches need to do."

Prof. Ashton said one of the first public health models was developed in Liverpool by Dr William Henry Duncan, appointed the city's first Medical Officer of Health in 1847.

Dr Duncan looked at detailed statistics when a deadly cholera epidemic broke out in the city and used it to pioneer a programme of street cleaning, improved water supplies and sewer building.

Now, centuries later, the model could be used to bring down stabbings and shootings on the same streets.

More police will not break cycle

Ms Kennedy has railed against cuts to police imposed by central government, but says the new VRU model could be a more effective way of bringing violence under control than extra bobbies on the beat.

She told the ECHO: "The increase in violence, both gun and knife crime, that we are experiencing is very disturbing and I have been concerned about it for a number of years, as have the chief constables of Merseyside Police.

"We're currently engaged in a significant targeted police activity which the government are funding, but that is a short-term response."

Ms Kennedy said that while a variety of projects aimed at preventing violence were already in place, there has until now not been a co-ordinated overall strategy aimed at bringing different organisations together to treat violence as a public health problem.

She said: "If we really want to break the cycle of violence going from generation to generation we need to be clear that a police response on its own will never work, an NHS response on its own will never work.

"The public health model is new for us, it's not new around the world. It's a model that the World Health Organisation has been promoting for decades."

Ms Kennedy said she has already consulted with Mr Rennie from the Scottish VRU and Professor Jonathan Shepherd, who has worked to establish a similar approach to preventing violence in Cardiff.

Professor Shepherd was inspired to research preventative models after noticing he was treating more and more assault victims suffering broken jaws and cheekbones, over half of which were from attacks not reported to police.

Ms Kennedy said: "They told us it's really a no-brainer this approach, but it will not work over-night. You have to do it year after year for at least 10 years.

"You could increase the number of police officers and still not break the overall cycle of violence."

Superintendent Mark Wiggins, from Merseyside Police, said: "In June the Home Office announced that it would be allocating £3.37m funding to Merseyside Police for this year financial year to set up a Violence Reduction Unit to provide an effective public health approach to reducing violent crime, early intervention and protecting our communities.

"Work is currently underway with representatives from various organisations across Merseyside, including local authorities, health trusts, education and other key stakeholders, to set up the VRU, which will provide a comprehensive approach to tackling serious violent crime, including knife crime.

"The partnership will be focused on making the streets of Merseyside safer by working in partnership using a public health approach looking at early intervention and prevention to reduce serious violence across the county."