London is known for many things. Among the least flattering is its reputation as a hotbed for knife crime. Last year Mexico, a country at war with drug cartels, updated its travel guidance to warn about knife assaults in Britain’s capital. According to Donald Trump, Londoners live in fear of being “stabbed in the ass”.
This was never really true. For six of the past eight years, New Yorkers have been more likely to be stabbed to death than Londoners
London is known for many things. Among the least flattering is its reputation as a hotbed for knife crime. Last year Mexico, a country at war with drug cartels, updated its travel guidance to warn about knife assaults in Britain’s capital. According to Donald Trump, Londoners live in fear of being “stabbed in the ass”.
This was never really true. For six of the past eight years, New Yorkers have been more likely to be stabbed to death than Londoners (and they have been at least ten times as likely to be killed by other means). That doesn’t mean the reputation was a complete fabrication. Knife crime rose dramatically in Britain from 2017, especially among teenagers. In the year to March 2018 more than 280 people were stabbed to death in England and Wales, up from the previous five-year average of just over 200 a year. London, the core of the crisis, accounted for 108 of those homicides (compared with 62 deadly stabbings in New York that year).
Since then rates of violence have declined precipitously. Hospitalisations for “assault by sharp object” have fallen by a third in London since their peak. Knife-related homicides have shrunk by a half. 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.
Thank Sadiq Khan. Right-wingers like to blame London’s Labour mayor for the capital’s imagined lawlessness. In fact Lord Khan introduced England to a knife-crime strategy that appears to be working. It has since spread beyond London.
As English politicians scrambled for answers during the 2017-19 “epidemic”, Lord Khan looked to Scotland. 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.
Between 2008 and 2018 Scotland’s VRUs were credited with bringing about a 38% fall in homicides and a 43% drop in attempted murders and serious assaults—many of them knife-related. Lord Khan announced England’s first VRU in London in 2018. Today there are 20 such units across England and Wales, covering areas that account for 80% of all knife crime.
A recent Home Office review found that England’s VRUs caused a 12% fall, since 2019, in hospital admissions for violent assault among the under-25s. That is modest compared with Glasgow, but the Home Office looked only at the national average. Violent crime has fallen most in cities like London—dense urban areas where the model is easiest to implement.
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. Nor can London’s (between mid-2020 and mid-2024 London lost 29% of its nightclubs). 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. 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.
The overarching logic, however, is sound. A 2023 study by the Youth Endowment Fund, a charity, found that having two or more adverse childhood experiences increases the risk of gang involvement by 61%. In Britain today violent crime is largely driven by organised-crime groups relying on vulnerable young people to traffic drugs. That is different from early-2000s Glasgow, where territorial street gangs were much more interested in recreational violence and turf wars than in drug trafficking. But in either case VRUs can help restrict the labour market available to exploitative gangs.
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. “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.
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