Mayor's violence reduction chief: you cannot “arrest your way” out

Lib Peck says a preventative approach to violent crime is working reports Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter

London cannot simply “arrest” its way out of high violent crime levels and must continue its preventative approach, the Mayor’s violence reduction chief has claimed.

Lib Peck, Director of the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), set up in 2019 to guide the new approach to tackling crime, said that there was a “real concern” about high levels of violence in the early years of Sir Sadiq Khan’s time in office.

Instead of taking a strict enforcement approach to the issue involving mass arrests, stop and search and surveillance, City Hall looked to Scotland, who originally sought the “public health approach” of targeted work within communities as early as 2005 to reduce criminality in the long term.

London’s VRU, which has now run for over seven years announced that the programme has reached over one million Londoners with specialised interventions where they are needed most.

“There were a lot of calls at the time for more police officers and an enforcement approach”, Peck recalled during an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

“There was also a real understandable concern from Londoners about what we were going to do about high levels of violence – and that was something that the Mayor himself felt very acutely.

“He recognised that while enforcement is an important part of reducing violence, you can’t arrest your way out of this. We need to develop and invest in a preventative approach, working with a whole range of partners across London and working out where to invest money.”

One Million Londoners

City Hall has now invested more than £140 million in the VRU’s activities since 2019, reaching 750,000 young people with “diversionary activities” such as music and sport, with a further 250,000 parents, carers, youth workers and professionals that work directly with young people have received dedicated training.

The VRU aims to intervene in young Londoners’ lives at crucial moments.

City Hall say hospital-based youth workers have guided 75 per cent of young people away from further harm, while youth workers in custody suites that are seeking to break the reoffending cycle have connected with nearly 17,000 young people.

Meanwhile, flagship MyEnds programme delivers hyper-local support, providing 60,000 targeted interventions directly to communities.

Officials say there are now nearly 12,500 fewer victims of violence with injury compared to when the VRU was established, whilst both gun crime and personal robbery are down by more than a quarter. Knife crime, they say, is now on a downward trend.

Peck said that the VRU started by focusing on the one per cent geographic area of London which contained 70 per cent of violent incidents in the entire city.

“We needed to be very targeted working in those communities where poverty and discrimination and deprivation had really been a kind of toxic combination for many, many years and resulted in a lot of intergenerational violence,” she added.

“We’ve done this by working closely with people who see the consequences of violence every day on the front line – youth workers, teachers, parents. And that is key because it’s the relationships in a young person’s life that very often make the difference.”

Winning Over the Critics

Despite a recognition that the preventative approach may not yield short-term results, Peck suggested there was cross-party recognition that something different needed to be done.

She is also confident that the scheme will be maintained by future occupants of City Hall.

She said: “If there’s a sense of crisis and the sense that what exists at the moment isn’t good enough, everybody turns their attention to something different, and that was part of the momentum behind the Violence Reduction Unit.

“Regardless of political party, people feel an affiliation to London. They want to be in a city that feels safe. And so while, of course, there was political pressure to do things immediately and to transform London, there was also an acknowledgement that we all needed to work together around this.”

There are still some critics of the VRU suggest that the money would be better off spent funding more police officers on London’s streets.

But Peck said that London has moved away from “short term fixes” to think about the long term strategy for the capital.

“We’ve won over critics through the evidence,” she suggested.

“There will always be new challenges, but prevention is an absolutely key element of working with young people and making London safer.

“Of course policing is an important part of that. They are one of our partners along with education and along with health, and they need the necessary resources. But prevention is often an overlooked part of it.”

Social Media

New challenges for the VRU during its brief existence have included the rapid rise and development of social media.

Rampant disinformation, misogynistic content and the ability to translate online disagreements into real-life violence are all ever-present dangers that both national government and City Hall need to get a grip of.

Peck says the VRU is investing in “online bystander” programmes, which help young people recognise what is happening and diffuse any tension. Such training is also extended to youth workers, many of whom will not be as tech-savvy themselves.

“There were a whole range of issues exposed by our research and, from our perspective, a lot of investment [needed] that follows to try and tackle them,” she reflected.

“But I do think it’s an ongoing challenge and something that we’re going to need to keep very close to and work very closely with young people.”

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