
Treating violence as a public health problem has produced great results - oska
https://mosaicscience.com/story/violence-crime-knife-chicago-glasgow-gang-epidemic-gun-health-prevention/
======
peteretep
> The [Scottish programme] is run by the police force, with support from the
> Scottish government ... [The American founder], a purist on the public
> health model of violence, says it is “horrible” for police to administer it,
> since police are often part of the problem.

As far from perfect as police in the UK are, I get the impression that the
Brits have a very different relationship from the police than most Americans
do.

~~~
ams6110
What do you think "most Americans" relationship with the police is? Speaking
for myself, I don't really have one, but all my encounters with the police
have been professional and respectful.

~~~
dickbasedregex
Lucky you.

Even with family as law enforcement, I've never trusted police. As a vet I'm
disgusted by their lack of training and quickness to shoot first and ask
questions later. Last I checked the average is 32 dogs shot by US cops a day.
I don't even need to delve into the refusal to wear body cams, race issues,
etc. etc. American police have not given Americans any reason to assume they
are ever on the same side.

Eighteen year old infantrymen, who have an infinitely greater chance of
danger, have more resolve and professionalism than American cops. I'd trust
that 18 year old ground pounder over a cop any day over any thing.

~~~
peteretep
I get the idea that people who join the police in the US do it for the
authority, where police in the UK are well aware that 95% of the authority
they have is "by consent" of those they have authority over.

~~~
dickbasedregex
As an American that's always been my feeling. Bullies and petty people seem to
be drawn to police work in the US for that "authority."

An idiot with authority is a bad time for everyone.

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j9461701
I'm not quite sure I fully buy into it. Crime has been steadily declining all
over the Western world since the '90s, with a few notable exceptions like
Baltimore post-BLM, and so the entire VRU concept may be specious. New York
has seen its murder rate plunge 75% since its height in 1990 despite not
employing this technique, which is a larger drop than Glasgow experienced.
Perhaps doing nothing would have been just as effective? Or perhaps this:

>This meant ramping up traditional penal measures – increased stop-and-search
and stricter sentencing for knife possession – alongside preventive measures
in line with the public health approach.

Resulted in all of the most recalcitrant offenders being put behind bars right
at the onset of the program, leaving behind only those people more amenable to
non-violence.

Or put another way, when the doctor mentions seeing constant repeated faces in
her ER:

>Often, the same people would come back through the accident and emergency
departments again and again, repeated victims and perpetrators of violent
attacks.

Would simply locking up every one of those people have produced a similar or
greater drop in violent crime compared to the VRU approach? Is the "violent
interceptor" and community outreach and counselors and all that simply gilding
a lily?

Also:

>The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in
her city had become.

Well that or it's 1890s Germany. The Junkers loved to scar each other on the
face with their dueling swords, as a way to prove their manhood and as a mark
of inclusion in the aristocratic orders.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar)

Some cultures get barbed wire tattoos around their arm, others a superficial
slashing wound to the face. Tomato tomato ....that expression really doesn't
work in text.

~~~
sometimesijust
You should be quoting violent crime rates rather than murder rates. The
articles premise is that violent crime is infectious but the infection does
not spread if the patients all die.

~~~
dredmorbius
David Simon (The Wire, Tremane) notes that murder stats are hard to game:
there's a corpse, and the determination is made by the coroner, not chief of
police or sherrif.

Othe crime stats can be easily and massively gamed.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw)

~~~
Jach
The game just shifts to one of attribution rather than what the rates are. A
lot of physical violence would have resulted in death not too long ago, but
thanks to medical technology like washing wounds, getting looked at by a
doctor, ambulances, surgery, drugs, etc. it's much harder to die. The lack of
as many deaths is then attributed to whatever cause is expedient (democracy,
authoritarian crackdown, etc.) when technology and access to it is probably
the best explanatory factor.

~~~
dredmorbius
I was going to mention that: trauma care has become _very_ good. Though you
still have gross bodily harm. And non-dead men generally _do_ tell tales.

------
sbaha88
I really hope that their work is effective and spreads. In Kazakhstan, we
recently had a tragedy when our Olympic bronze medalist was killed when trying
to stop thieves from stealing his car mirrors.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Rest in peace Denis Ten :(

I'm curious, was this crime very unusual even for Almaty, that someone gets
killed by strangers over something like a car mirror, or is it the fact that
it was Ten that caused such attention?

~~~
sbaha88
It's actually very unusual especially because it happened right in Almaty's
downtown. Downtowns in Kazakhstan are usually considered safe.

------
elboru
I would love to see something similar applied to Mexico. The scale would have
to be a lot bigger, and I guess it would be a lot more dangerous since we are
literally facing wars for territory over here, taking soldiers out of the
battlefield wouldn't look appealing for the drug cartels.

~~~
jessaustin
No need for anything complicated. Just end drug prohibition in USA, and Mexico
will change drastically within a year. Human beings respond to incentives.

~~~
usrusr
Makes me wonder what the existing organizations will do instead. Removing drug
money will make them much less powerful, but they sure won't go down without a
pivot.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I guess you could look at what happened when prohibition ended in America.

~~~
azernik
Soooooooo politics?

------
panic
_> “The idea that’s wrong is that these people are ‘bad’ and we know what to
do with them, which is punish them,” says Slutkin. “That’s fundamentally a
misunderstanding of the human. Behaviour is formed by modelling and copying.
When you’re in a health lens, you don’t blame. You try to understand, and you
aim for solutions.”_

Analyzing our current justice system from this perspective shows just how
absurd it is. Sending people to jail for committing minor crimes is like
sending people to a smallpox quarantine camp for coughing.

~~~
vorpalhex
This sounds great until we realize that the vast majority of crimes, even
minor ones, have someone on the other side of them.

Simple assault, theft, fraud, reckless driving. Hey, someone came up and beat
the crap out of you for the $20 in your wallet? Well sorry, we can't do
anything but talk about how they might of come to this point. Someone who gets
the flu, unless they're acting to intentionally infect others, has no
"victim".

That doesn't mean justice should be based on retribution, but removal of the
offender from society is something which society typically requires.

~~~
SandersAK
Violence is an output, a symptom of something else. Punishing a violent
offender with violence (imprisonment etc) is just a form of reifying that
behavior.

Alternative treatment of violence is not the same as saying there are "no
consequences" \- it's acknowledging that to actually "cure" violent behavior
requires other methods.

Removing people from society has historically not stopped violence (see
Gulags, mass prison, etc). What it does do is instill a sense of fear in the
populace that the governing power can use as a form of control. A sense of
fear brought on by, you guessed it, a threat of violence!

------
aaronbrethorst
The NRA has been extremely effective at keeping gun violence from being
studied in exactly this manner in the United States.
[https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-
worked-...](https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-to-
stifle-gun-violence-research)

~~~
AmericanChopper
If “the most violent country in the developed world” has the some of the
worlds strictest gun control laws, something tells me there’s not much of a
connection between gun ownership and violent crime.

~~~
ekianjo
Even though your point is totally valid, you are being downvoted for having an
unpopular opinion. Sad.

~~~
talltimtom
That “point” is that a special interest group is justified in preventing
scientific study into a area because he feels that his entirely non
encompassing and non-scientific observation would invalidate any results he
does not agree with. It is wrong on so many levels. That is why it is being
downvoted.

~~~
vorpalhex
> in preventing scientific study into a area

The policy came about because a particular CDC head in the 1980s specifically
said he intended to show firearms as the root cause of violence, nevermind
what any actual stats said. The CDC to this day _still_ has problems with
doing a study, not liking the result, and then deciding it would rather not
publish the study - [https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-
time-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-the-cdc-
asked-about-defensive-gun-uses/#1ce83800299a)

This has no effect on private research. It only prevents federal money from
being used for a traditionally partisan cause.

~~~
tacomonstrous
Is your argument that one possibly questionable study invalidates the entire
field from being eligible for federal funding? That would mean that the
government shouldn't fund any research whatsoever!

~~~
vorpalhex
No my argument is that the major organization pushing for this has repeatedly
been caught on record, under oath, explicitly admitting to bias and
consistently pushing biased research.

If even 5% of a research coming out of a publication was biased, nobody would
let anything in the publication be cited. When that publication is funded
exclusively by tax payer money paid to a government with a fiduciary duty...

------
vixen99
Someone please tell the Mayor of London where in 2018 the "capital's murder
rate overtakes New York for the first time ever".

~~~
simoncarter
From the article:

"Where could a public health approach to violence be introduced next? One
possibility is London, where in 2017 knife crime among under-25s reached a
five-year high. In recent months, the Metropolitan Police commissioner,
Cressida Dick, and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, have been among those calling for a
public health approach."

~~~
nortiero
Just to add a few details, Cressida Dick is the person who ordered the
execution of a brasilian electrician, down in the London Underground. It does
not surprise me that aristocrats are in favour of a medical approach to crime:
to help enforce the state monopoly on violence itself.

------
rootw0rm
meh, that's kinda painful to read... needs some editing. also, an article with
that many statistical claims should have footnotes IMO.

~~~
oska
> also, an article with that many statistical claims should have footnotes IMO

If you click on 'References' at the bottom of the article you get a short drop
down list.

But there is also a companion article [1] that gives more references and
links.

[1] [https://mosaicscience.com/story/briefing-reading-violence-
cr...](https://mosaicscience.com/story/briefing-reading-violence-crime-knife-
gang-epidemic-gun-health-prevention/)

------
DanielBMarkham
I love the idea of doing things to prevent more suffering.

 _“Despite the fact that violence has always been present, the world does not
have to accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition,” says the WHO
guidance on violence prevention._

But this is bullshit. Humans are a violent species. Always have been, always
will be. The only question that's relevant is: when is it acceptable that
violence be used? Ideally it would be a bare minimum, and by people who have
nothing to benefit from it. If there's a crack house with a kid that needs
rescuing, or a bank robbery gone bad with a hostage, I want somebody somewhere
to be using violence.

Public health approaches to social problems are interesting, both because they
have some statistically significant benefit -- and because they tend to over-
generalize what the problems are and leave out many important edge cases. You
can't say they're bad because there is progress to be shown. But you always
wonder how many edge cases were overlooked and if overall we aren't
institutionalizing a hardcore subset that will never be solved at the expense
of making the problem simple enough to mentally engage with.

~~~
tremon
_Humans are a violent species._

If this were true, then how come daycare centers and nurseries don't have to
deal with violent toddlers all day long? By your premise, our violence is
genetic, so infants must be taught to control their violence in order to
become succesful adults. At what stage of development does that happen?

~~~
Ensorceled
Umm, most toddlers must be taught that hitting is wrong. As someone with more
than 40 younger cousins, it’s kind of the only thing they all had in common.

