Last year Mexico, a country at war with drug cartels, updated its travel guidance to warn about knife assaults in Britain’s capital. London is known for many things. Among the least flattering is its reputation as a hotbed for knife crime.
Londoners live in fear of being “stabbed in the ass”, according to Donald Trump.
Knife-related homicides have shrunk by a half. In the previous decade Glasgow, once labelled Europe’s murder capital, had achieved impressive reductions in violent crime. One reason was the roll-out of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), which aims to prevent violent crime by bringing the police, schools, hospitals and sports clubs together to identify at-risk children and direct them away from crime. There are caveats. Alcohol use, a big factor in violent crime, has dropped across the country, too. Scotland’s success, which occurred around the same time as changes to licensing laws, cannot be put down just to its VRU. It also takes time to work out what produces the best results in a given area. Scotland did well by placing youth workers in accident-and-emergency departments to reach children with violence-related injuries. “It’s the philosophy of violence reduction, of changing the mindset that is the most important. Lord Khan is often ridiculed for what can appear a fluffy approach, emphasising the importance of youth clubs and keeping troublesome children at school. But his soft approach is having hard effects.
Last year teenage homicides in the capital fell to their joint lowest level (similar to 2012) in almost 30 years. In 2025 you were twice as likely to be stabbed to death in New York as in London. Nor can London’s (between mid-2020 and mid-2024 London lost 29% of its nightclubs).
Hospitalisations for “assault by sharp object” have fallen by a third in London since their peak. As English politicians scrambled for answers during the 2017-19 “epidemic”, Lord Khan looked to Scotland. Scotland’s success, according to Iain Brennan, a criminologist, was not just to adopt the model but to change the hearts and minds of all involved.
Since then rates of violence have declined precipitously. VRUs in England and Wales, still in an earlier stage, are spending a lot on interventions, such as school visits, that show little evidence of working.
