London’s Violence Reduction Unit helped cut knife crime among young people by 56 per cent since 2018. The unit started in 2019, using targeted local interventions to guide youth away from violence. Lib Peck said, "people who live and work in that area know that area best" regarding their approach.
The capital's Violence Reduction Unit has sought to make targeted interventions while guiding young people in a positive direction
In 2018, Donald Trump took aim at London's problem with knife crime. "Knives, knives, knives," he said, claiming that one hospital was "like a war zone", with floors covered in blood.
The US president has continued to argue that London is dangerous, saying as recently as September that crime was "very high".
In fact, the level of knife violence among the young has changed dramatically over the past eight years.
In the 2018-2019 financial year, 585 under-25s in London were admitted to hospital for assault with knives and other sharp objects -- a measure considered by experts to be the most accurate for calculating knife crime trends. In the year to July 2026, the number was 260, a fall of 56 per cent.
The drop coincides with the launch of a new way to tackle an old problem by London's mayor, and long-term target of Trump, Lord Sadiq Khan.
The Violence Reduction Unit, which started its work in 2019, was modelled on an approach developed in Scotland 20 years ago, borrowing from the battle against other public health problems such as obesity and smoking.
The idea was that targeted interventions, geared to what led young people into violence, could steer them in other directions.
One of the findings it has acted on in London was the localised nature of its knife violence: just 1 per cent of the capital generated 70 per cent of violent incidents, research found.
As a result, aspects of the VRU's work have been targeted at about 30 areas. Among these is Harts Lane Estate in Barking, on London's eastern fringes -- a collection of drab, postwar social housing suffering high levels of poverty.
The VRU, which has received £140mn funding over the past seven years, gave £800,000 to a consortium of local groups working around Harts Lane to divert young people from violence.
The idea is "that people who live and work in that area know that area best", according to Lib Peck, a former leader of south London's Lambeth council, who is now director of London's VRU.
"It keeps me out of trouble," said Adam, which is not his real name, speaking at Be Heard As One's offices in nearby Dagenham. "I'm accountable for my actions."
Akosah has helped the teenager to apply for training in managing temporary traffic lights at roadworks, a job he has just started.
As part of their work, local initiatives such as Akosah's are encouraged to make a special effort to seek out young people that more traditional services might not encounter.
The unit also targets youngsters at decisive points in their lives, when they might be especially open to making a positive change. It has stationed workers in hospitals to engage with youngsters admitted for violent crime injuries and in police stations to work with those arrested for the first time.
Peck expressed confidence that the thousands of such interventions by her unit were having an effect.
Amid the generally low homicide rate in London last year, there were only eight killings of teenagers, down from 30 in 2021, which was the highest level since 2008.
Peck said the programme had "confounded" sceptics -- a reference to Conservative politicians who had argued for funds to be spent on more policing, not the programme's public health approach.
Iain Brennan, a professor of criminology at the University of Hull who has examined the effectiveness of VRUs, said they had demonstrated some success in bringing down crime levels. The London unit was the first of 20 such units operating across England and Wales.
"The success has been that we no longer see this as just a police problem and we've actually created the infrastructure to do something," he said.
In Barking and Dagenham, meanwhile, there are not yet specific figures on crime rate changes in the very specific areas targeted.
But police figures for the whole Barking and Dagenham borough show a 7.4 per cent decrease in knife crime with injury incidents in the year to September, compared with the year to March 2024 before the funding started.
Akosah said that reflected a general improvement. "It was notoriously known that Barking and Dagenham had quite a big crime element going on," he said. "What we've managed is the crime has reduced in Barking and Dagenham; antisocial behaviour has reduced."
More widely, Peck said VRU's work had an additional significance as a bulwark against a wave of international disinformation about the levels of violence in London.
Mayor Khan last year attacked what he described as a "dark blizzard of disinformation" about crime in the capital. As recently as last December, Trump claimed there were parts of London where police did not want to go.
Yet the figures, Peck pointed out, showed that London was "safer than all the big cities in the US and many of the major European cities".
She added: "The only way that we can tackle that is being very clear and very loud about what is happening."