IN 2005 the World Health Organisation branded Glasgow the murder capital of Europe. The city’s gangs specialised in administering “Glasgow smiles”: cuts at each corner of a victim’s mouth, leaving scars running up their cheeks. But since then, knife crime has plummeted. The number of people admitted to the city’s hospitals for slashes and stab wounds fell by 65% between 2004-05 and 2016-17. These days, the trauma surgeon at Glasgow’s facial-surgery unit has so much spare time that he spends some of it removing wisdom teeth.

Those south of the border are taking a keen interest in Glasgow’s success. Knife crime in England and Wales has risen by 54% in the past three years. The homicide rate is also ticking up, after years of decline. Murders in London are at their highest in more than a decade. Alarmed, police and politicians in England are hoping to copy Scotland’s turnaround.

In the year that the WHO issued its damning verdict on Glasgow, the police there established a Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). Set up to focus on Glasgow, it soon expanded to the rest of Scotland. At first its approach was conventional, ramping up stop-and-search while toughening the law on knives. Between 2005-06 and 2014-15, the average sentence for carrying a knife more than tripled, to over a year. But the VRU combined this no-nonsense policing with a “public health” approach to violence. Officers saw that Glasgow’s roughest areas were also its poorest, with the highest rates of addiction, domestic abuse and teenage pregnancy. Violence was recast as a symptom of such ills.

Early intervention became the mantra of the VRU, which linked policing to social work, education and employment. The unit seeks out victims of violence in hospitals to help them find counselling and places to stay. It also partners with charities that teach children not to carry knives. New education policies, which reduced school exclusions, helped such work.

The VRU’s greatest feat, says Sir Harry Burns, Scotland’s former chief medical officer, has simply been finding listless young men things to do. In the beginning these included a night-time football league in Glasgow’s east end, held during the peak hours for gang violence. Today it helps them find jobs with businesses willing to take on workers with a criminal record. One such firm, set up by the VRU itself, is a fast-food joint called Street & Arrow.

The approach makes economic sense, says Iain Murray, a police inspector in the VRU. The long-term cost to society of each murder in Scotland is reckoned to be about £1.9m ($2.4m), whereas the VRU runs on an annual budget of just £1.3m. Since it was set up, murders have more than halved. Callum, a worker at Street & Arrow, was admitted to hospital 17 times in 12 months, mostly for fighting. Today he is holding down a job and paying taxes for the first time. Scotland is far from cracking violent crime: Scots are still twice as likely to be assaulted as the English. But the gap is narrowing.

Would Scotland’s model work in England? Several English police forces have already been up to learn about it. A forthcoming report by MPs calls for a public health approach in England and Wales. Many of the VRU’s ideas were themselves borrowed from abroad, particularly America. With a bit of tweaking, says Mr Murray, they could work anywhere.

There are a number of obstacles. London is divided into 32 boroughs, each with its own police team. Joining the dots would be difficult, says John Poyton of Redthread, a youth charity in the capital. Sarah Jones, a London Labour MP, says budget cuts have stripped away the social workers and local bobbies needed for such an approach. And people trust the police more in Glasgow than in London, where perceptions of racism sour relations.

Back at Street & Arrow, Eddie, an ex-con who now works with the police to mentor young men, is convinced that Glasgow’s model would work down south. More than anything, he believes, people caught up in violence need a space that allows them to confront their emotions. “I’ll tell you what can take the sting out of anything,” he says. “A cuddle”.