Reducing violence in the UK by 50% in the next 10 years

Reducing violence in the UK by 50% in the next 10 years

A talk by Professor Manuel Eisner, Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

In June, Policy Leaders Fellows convened for CSaP’s 38th Policy Leaders Fellows day on the theme ‘Reducing serious violence and understanding what it means to feel "safer"’. Professor Manuel Eisner gave a talk on the key challenges and policy priorities for achieving the government’s Safer Streets Mission.

Professor Eisner opened by outlining how Labour's ambitious Safer Streets Mission fits into a wider agenda of setting long-term policy goals. Such goals are essential to support strategic leadership, but they also come with challenges. For example, some goals such as seeking to ‘restore confidence in the police and criminal justice system’ have a subjective element, and it is unclear how we might achieve them. Also, the strength of the evidence-base for the proposed interventions varies. Increasing police staffing has been shown to be particularly effective in reducing violent street crime in particular. However, for measures such as introducing specialist courts to handle rape cases, the evidence is currently less unequivocal.

A further challenge highlighted was a ‘knowledge gap’ in how to reduce violence. Most of the scientific evidence base that informs policy-making comes from randomised controlled trials, where clearly defined interventions are delivered to high standards. However, much less is known about the complex processes that lead to a decline of violence in entire cities or societies, and how governments can take measures that support such population-wide change.

Trends in violence rates

The talk next explored why population-wide declines in violence happen, and what governments can do to make these declines happen. Using the example of violence reduction in the UK, data was shown on how violent victimisation and domestic burglaries have declined consistently since 1998, and homicide rates have declined across all four UK nations from 1998 before reaching a plateau in 2013.

Although unrelated to violence, similar trends are seen in behavioural indicators in teenagers, such as smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and using drugs which have all declined since the late 1990s. Professor Eisner hypothesised that these trends, including those on violent crimes, are seen due to offenders exhibiting various of these ‘problem behaviours’, and the declines are not linked to targeting one specific behaviour. Increased monitoring since the 1990s like CCTV cameras and mobile phone data, policies on tobacco and alcohol use, and cultural changes could all feed into reducing these problem behaviours including violent crimes, despite the policies not being designed primarily to reduce violence.

Violence reduction policies

Professor Eisner spoke about the need for targeted measures in defined spaces for specific behaviours in order to reduce violence. For instance, he discussed how anti-bullying programmes and prevention of school exclusions, as well as evidence-based policing strategies like crime hotspot policing in public spaces, reduce violent crimes. He also noted violence prevention policies alone are limited in their potential to reduce violence across a whole population. This led to an exploration of how policies beyond crime control can reduce violence. He mentioned two toolkits by the Youth Endowment Fund and the College of Policing that have collated data to show evidence that programmes such as nutrition initiatives in schools, and broader measures to better address mental health needs of young people can help to reduce violence and crime.

One case study that Professor Eisner spoke about was how Singapore and Jamaica, which were both formerly part of the British Empire, have completely diverged in terms of violent crime trends since becoming independent in the 1960s. He suggested that Singapore’s housing policies played a role in a downward trend in violent crimes, as this avoided spatial segregation. In contrast, rapid development in urban areas of Jamaica led to concentrations of deprivation and disadvantage along with an increase in crime in these localised areas.

Evidence-based policymaking to reduce violent crime

For the government to achieve its goal of halving violent crimes in the next 10 years, Professor Eisner argued that involving academics and having more effective knowledge transfer would be key. He explained that the rapid technological and social changes we are seeing today changes the causes and manifestations of violence, and therefore intervention options. Because of this, he emphasised that we need better data and a stronger research-policy link. One way to strengthen research-policy links are research-based postgraduate programmes for leaders in prevention, policing, and criminal justice. They can help leaders to conduct research on practitioner-led topics that address strategic needs in violence reduction.

To conclude, Professor Eisner stressed the ongoing need for dynamic and evidence-informed approaches to violence reduction.