The woman taking the fight to Glasgow's gangs

Two women are powering through the streets of Glasgow in heels, bearing down on the cafe at the Centre for Contemporary Arts.

'I need a favour,’ the dark-haired one says. 'Can you fix this guy Drew’s tooth? He’s 17. His front one snapped off in a fight, and he’s going for job interviews.’

'My husband’ll do it for free,’ says the other, ash-blond, soft-spoken.

The dark-haired one is Karyn McCluskey, Scotland’s top gangbuster, the 45-year-old co-director of the Violence Reduction Unit in Glasgow. Following the riots in England this summer, David Cameron told a sombre House of Commons that it would be 'a national priority’ to follow McCluskey’s example in reducing gang violence.

She surges into the open atrium of the cafe, and orders us coffee, banana cake and a bowl of chips. 'We need to get him some suits for his interview. He’s applying to be a joiner,’ she continues, yanking out a notepad and scribbling.

Across the table is her friend and ally Dr Christine Goodall, an oral surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She has stitched up victims of violence like Drew for 12 years. The pair often brainstorm ideas over coffee. 'Tesco do good suits,’ Goodall says, picking at the chips. 'My husband got his dinner suit there.’

Drew is 17. After being arrested 12 times last year, he was referred to McCluskey’s gang programme. He is one of 400 gang members who have been on the programme, which has reduced their violent offending by almost 50 per cent.

Based on Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, which helped reduce gang homicides in the US in the 1990s, the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) is a police-led scheme backed by social and community safety services, education and housing experts.

I met Drew earlier in McCluskey’s office. He is gaunt and undernourished, and has wide, startled eyes. A thin red scar runs across his throat. Drew took his first beating in a gang fight aged eight. They clipped his heels from under him, and battered him with bricks, bottles and coshes, leaving him hospitalised for four weeks with a snapped ankle, broken ribs and a dislocated knee.

'I like being with my pals and getting mad with it,’ he shrugs. 'I grew up to hate the police.’

In 2002, when McCluskey started her job as the head of intelligence with Strathclyde Police, Glasgow was the murder capital of Europe, with 71 killings a year.

McCluskey had trained as a nurse and studied forensic psychology. She had worked in Tanzania and Northern Ireland, ending up as the head of police intelligence at West Mercia Constabulary. They had two killings a year. The challenge she faced in Glasgow was overwhelming.

'If you ask what people think of me, they’ll say I’m relentless. I can’t sit down,’ McCluskey says. 'You can lead, follow or get out of the way. But don’t hinder me.’ Her colleagues call her 'Sparky’, for her constant stream of ideas.

I have known McCluskey since she was seconded to the Metropolitan Police for six months in 2009, and found her so inspiring that a third of my recent book on gangs, Hood Rat, is about her work reducing violence.

While she enjoyed the West Mercia posting, she felt isolated as a single mother – she has an 11-year-old daughter – so returned to Glasgow to be nearer her parents. Her father represented Great Britain in judo at the Olympics, and she was brought up to believe she could do anything. One sister flies jets in the US, the other is a razor-sharp academic in West Belfast. McCluskey regularly trains for triathlons, and tears out to Glasgow’s housing estates in her battered Audi with rap music on the car stereo. 'I like the fast beat,’ she says. 'I listen to it when I’m running.’

Faced with Glasgow’s terrifyingly high murder rate, McCluskey realised that the existing policing methods weren’t working. Strathclyde Police had tried a mixture of crackdowns on knife crime and binge drinking, foot patrols and stop-and-searches. But these have worked only in the short term. 'We called it a Rosa Parks moment,’ she says. 'We realised we had to do something different.’

McCluskey gathered intelligence about gangs in Strathclyde and found that there were 170 of them, with 3,500 members aged from about 11 to 23. She talked to trauma surgeons such as Christine Goodall, who revealed that two thirds of slashings were going unreported to the police. Victims were afraid of reprisals from the gangs – the notorious wall of silence.

The reality was shocking: a serious facial injury every six hours and 300 attempted murders a year. As she scrutinised CCTV footage of the fights, McCluskey realised that kids such as Drew were fighting because of the thrill – recreational violence.

'They were really enjoying it,’ she says. 'You could see it in their faces. Young men fighting in the streets. Sensation-seeking. Risk-taking. Caught up in the heat of the moment. Young guys who don’t make good decisions for themselves.’

If you were to look at CCTV footage of the London riots, she says, you would see exactly the same behaviour.

McCluskey wanted something that tackled the toxic group dynamics of gangs and opted for Boston’s Operation Ceasefire model, devised by an academic called David Kennedy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1996. She paid him a visit in New York.

The idea is to engage directly with the gangs, telling them explicitly to stop the violence. This message is delivered to gang members who are invited to attend a forum in a courtroom, known as a 'call-in’. A senior police officer gives them a choice: if anyone, including gang members not present, commits an assault or murder, the police will come down hard on the whole group. If they decide to renounce gang fighting, they can be put on a programme to help them with training, housing, education and employment.

One of McCluskey’s biggest challenges was getting the various partners in the scheme to work together. 'At the very beginning it was incredibly difficult,’ she says. 'People said, “It’s too big, don’t bother.” Because it’s easier doing nothing. But you’ve got to try something.’

One crucial supporter was Stephen House, the chief constable of Strathclyde Police. He commissioned the CIRV programme in 2008. CIRV was funded for the first two years with £1.4 million from the Scottish Government and £3.4 million from partners and services in kind. 'He is very, very focused,’ McCluskey says. 'We had to have that really hard-edged enforcement.’

For CIRV to work, it is important that gang members who do not change their behaviour are punished severely and feel pestered. 'If you’re not doing what you’re told, if you’re not changing, then we’re going to do loads of stop-searches,’ McCluskey says. 'Stephen has been relatively unrelenting about that. Some people get enthusiastic and then it tails off. The mark of someone who’s really good is if you can keep it going for years on end. He’s done that.’

Her strongest ally was Det Supt John Carnochan, her co-director at the Violence Reduction Unit. A former homicide detective with a distinguished career in the Serious Crime Squad, the Drug Squad, as a hostage negotiator and surveillance work in the Scottish Crime Squad, Carnochan is an enlightened, persuasive speaker. 'We spark off each other. It helps when there’s two of you,’ McCluskey says. 'You take really tough decisions, so you surround yourself with good people, don’t you?’

To put together a coalition of the willing, McCluskey and Carnochan had to lobby all the partners involved. They found that some senior police would respond better to a man with braid on his shoulder. 'I would go to divisional commanders’ meetings because I’ve known them a long time, even if the words I was saying were words Karyn had thought up,’ Carnochan says.

'If Karyn went along, it’d be far more difficult for her. The other side of that coin is that Karyn would go to men’s groups and women’s groups about violence against women and single parents. I couldn’t go because they would lynch me.’

Between 60 and 70 gang members attended the first CIRV call-in, held in October 2008 in the Glasgow Sheriff Court. They were ushered through a cordon of mounted police. McCluskey was surprised that the boys could even be in the same room together without battering one other.

They sat in the public gallery, facing a group who sat on the bench. The first to address them was a police chief in full uniform. Behind him, CCTV images flashed on a screen. The gang members gasped as they recognised their own grainy faces in the images.

'We know who you are, where you live and who you associate with,’ the police chief said. 'If we wanted to, we could have officers outside your front door.’

A trauma surgeon showed them graphic pictures of slash wounds to the face, and told them what would happen to them when they ended up lying in A&E. 'That very first call-in was phenomenal,’ Carnochan remembers. 'The room was absolutely electric.’

There have been 10 call-ins since then. One ex-offender who addressed the boys was Iain, 33. At 15, he slashed another young man’s face. By 19, he had a string of convictions. His pattern of offending was typical of the boys who are targeted by CIRV. 'I killed my pal in a fight when I was 20,’ he says. 'He ran about in the same gang as me. My ma knew his ma. I knew his whole family. I’d got in a fight and he’d battered me. I couldn’t let it go.’

Iain is one of many ex-offenders used by CIRV for mentoring the young gang members. The most powerful moment in the 2008 call-in was when a mother whose child was the victim of a gang assault came to speak to them. She was the same age as their own mothers and of similar background, with a soft, firm voice.

'At the age of 13, my son was attacked by a gang with machetes,’ she told them. 'Afterwards, I did not recognise he was my child. He was so badly, badly attacked. He lifted his hands to protect himself and lost his fingers.’ When she stopped talking, some of the youths were blinking hard, fighting back tears.

'I’ve talked to a lot of parents now and I still find it really emotional,’ McCluskey says. It is still the hardest part of her work. 'What really gets me about the parents is that they don’t want their sons to be forgotten. Take John Muir, who lost his son Damien in a stab attack. John does loads of work campaigning on mandatory sentencing for carrying a knife. John is never going to forget the day his son died, but he’s getting older and it’s destroyed the whole of his life. Then there’s Joyce Young, whose son James died. Joyce does a lot of work with us here and is just a really impressive person.’

Young comes in and I sit with her. She is 39, an attractive blonde wearing a mini-dress and fashionable mac. She works as a midwife at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and lives in Black Hill, a deprived part of the city with high unemployment.

'People ask you how many kids you have. I actually just lie. You can’t say to a mum, “My son died”.’

James was 18 when he was stabbed in an unprovoked attack in the middle of the day, one Monday in 2007. His attacker was a drug addict, just out on bail. Young was soon at her son’s side. 'James was in the Royal in resuscitation,’ she says. 'There are things you should never have to see or watch. But you need to be there. There wasn’t a minute that I thought, “He’s going to die”. I thought, “There are doctors and nurses, they save people all the time”.’

After James’s death she looked into community violence and was appalled at the statistics. Sixty-two other young people died that year. She got in touch with CIRV about educating teenagers. 'I stood up at a call-in and talked about James. The first time, I felt sick, having to speak about him in the past tense.’

In April this year, CIRV became part of the mainstream business of Strathclyde Police, with the Violence Reduction Unit retaining only a strategic interest. But McCluskey remains at its heart. Central to her view is the idea of investing in early-years development. The evidence is overwhelming and the costs are not high.

McCluskey recommends I visit Jeely Piece pre-five nursery in Castlemilk, south Glasgow, to meet Maureen Douglass, who has worked there 18 years. McCluskey believes strongly that the work of the Jeely Piece Club is a key model in early-years interventions. 'Maureen believes absolutely in the dandelion children, who make it despite the worst background,’ McCluskey says. 'I can’t tell you how much I like her.’

Douglass is warm, instantly like­able. She shows me how the Jeely Piece Club helps hundreds of toddlers whose parents are drug-addicted, alcoholic or have domestic violence issues, and can’t attach themselves to their children. They meet their child’s basic physical needs but that’s it. The children are not able to play with others. They are known as floaters or butterflies. With dolls they show a father chasing a mother up the stairs, a mother hiding in a cupboard.

Sometimes these children’s own learnt propensity for violence can emerge as early as two, with punching, slapping or biting. Through special playtime, trained workers develop their emotions and self-esteem. Toddlers can relax in a sensory room amid calming lights and music, escape the chaos of home. Douglass remembers how they put out a dressing-up rail for older children to express themselves. Two 11-year-old girls put on dresses and handbags, came over to her, gave her a hard slap and bawled, 'You’re f***ing grounded, get in the house.’ Douglass was scared at their level of violence.

I ask her about the fathers. 'We don’t get fathers here. They don’t even know where the nursery is.’

Douglass has worked at the Jeely nursery since it started 18 years ago and children who started out there are now proactive in the community. 'Knowing what I do about violence and criminality,’ Carnochan says. 'I have no doubt that the Jeely has saved lives.’ The nursery will see its services reduced in April next year when its funding comes to an end.

McCluskey arrives back from a New York trip fired up with new ideas for a pilot scheme to tackle alcohol-related violence. There is a lively, robust discussion at the 9.30am team meeting. One male colleague rubs his eyes and says, 'There’s an emotive argument for it, but it will take time to put the numbers together.’ McCluskey keeps pushing.

There are concerns raised about what the Scottish Parliament response might be. 'We’ll do it as a health measure, not criminal justice,’ says McCluskey, who adheres to the World Health Organisation theory of violence as an infectious disease that is passed on from father to son and between aggressive kids. When will the pilot be ready? A colleague suggests a date, but McCluskey insists on a month sooner. The discussion roams over the issues, until McCluskey chops the air with her hand. 'It will prevent violence. It’s as simple as that,’ she says.

As she emerges from the meeting, there is word of a call from Downing Street. When McCluskey saw CCTV images of the recent riots, she had a sense of déjà vu. 'It is criminal what happened in the riots,’ she says, 'but it’d be even more criminal if they [the Government] missed the opportunity now. Wouldn’t it be great if people look back and say, look what England did then.’

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is involved in a cross-departmental group looking into gang issues, hosting an international conference next month. Carnochan’s advice for David Cameron is to pause and think: 'They say the difference between a politician and statesman is that a politician thinks of the next election, a statesman thinks for the next generation. We need more statesmen.’

McCluskey hopes the 'broom army’, the volunteers who helped clean up the streets after the riots, was the beginning of community involvement, that many of them will go on to be mentors. She believes that zero tolerance is a 'militaristic way of policing’ and she worries that if a child who makes one mistake is given a harsh sentence too early, they will never leave the system.

Part of CIRV’s success has, of course, been McCluskey’s single-mindedness, her drive. Other schemes have fared less well elsewhere. The Met trialled a pilot scheme called Pathways in Lewisham, south-east London, but watered the group call-in down to individual sessions. The Home Office recommended Manchester adopt the Ceasefire model in 2001, but the police once again didn’t stage call-ins. You wonder to what extent those schemes didn’t succeed because they didn’t have Karyn McCluskey.

Some names have been changed