Glasgow, the headlines kept saying, was the “murder capital of Europe”.

Two decades or so ago the city routinely came close to the top of the continent’s league tables for homicide. So too did Scotland.

Not any more. There were 48 violent killings north of the border in 2022-23, the lowest since records began, and down from 137 in 2004-2005.

In Glasgow the decline has been the most dramatic, from 40 to seven in 18 years.

This success has long become an international story as foreigners look at whether they can emulate Scotland’s strategy of treating violence as a public health problem. 

In truth, violent crime in Scotland stopped falling some time ago and has stabilised. 

There is ongoing angst, not least about school assaults recorded on mobile phones.

But where do we stand now? How does Glasgow and Scotland rank? How does our homicide rate compare with peer nations? 

After all, many other cities and countries have also experienced falling violence over the last two decades.

A team of academics at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research  (SCCJR) have spent three years taking stock of the country’s violent reduction efforts. 

Their landmark report, Safe Space, brims with insights. But it also has solid numbers on international comparisons. These reveal that both Glasgow and Scotland are now distinctly average. 

We are mid-table.

Scotland’s homicide rate in 2021, according to detailed comparative figures from the United Nations, was 0.97 per 100,000. 

Crudely, fewer than ten in every million Scots met a violent death. That, in ballpark terms, is a pretty typical figure for western Europe. 

So a little lower than, say, Sweden, France, Serbia and Romania and a bit higher than Greece, Croatia and Germany.

The Scottish figure is also lower than in England and Wales. Their combined homicide rate was 1.17 per 100,000.

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The actual homicide capital of Europe? Well that would be Latvia in 2021. It has more than five times more illegal killings than Scotland per capita. And the least murdery country? That would be Malta. Its homicide rate was just 0.39 per 100,000 in 2021.

Figures in smaller jurisdictions for a crime as rare as homicide can pop and down. And this is especially true of cities. A single serial killer or terror act can skew numbers. 

But Glasgow’s trend has been clear. 

“Glasgow underwent an exceptional period of violence decline during 2004-2015,” Keir Irwin-Rogers, a criminologist at the Open University and one of the team behind the SCCJR report, told The Herald on Sunday.

“It moved from being a city with one of the highest homicide rates in Europe, to a place that was much more closely aligned with comparable European cities. 

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“While Glasgow homicide rates have continued with a more gradual decline in the years since 2015, in London, homicide rates have been increasing.”

Irwin-Rogers added: “At a UK level, while Scotland’s homicide rate was significantly higher than England and Wales (and most other European countries) in 2004, it now sits squarely in line with its Western and Northern European neighbours.

There is not yet good comparative data for city-level homicides from the United Nations for recent years. 

Analysts always warn of the dangers of making comparisons across borders. 

Homicides are the easiest figures to benchmark - but even a crude body count can be misleading because of different ways of recording and categorising crime.

The last UN comparative figures for cities - for 2015 - show Glasgow level-pegging with Paris (not including the horrific toll of terror deaths in the French capital that year).

Homicides - which will include crimes like murder and culpable homicide in Scotland or manslaughter in common law jurisdictions like England - are also not necessarily a clear signal of overall violent crime. 

Access to firearms, for example, can mean countries with lower levels of overall violence have more deaths. 

London has seen homicides bobble up and down in recent years. There were 112 in 2022-23. That, after crudely adjusting for population, would give a figure higher than Glasgow’s in the same year. But there are still no internationally approved benchmark figures.

Authorities in England and Wales have partially adopted some Glasgow and Scottish tactics, such as early intervention work with children and teenagers. 

Sadiq Khan, the major of London, has supported the development of a Violence Reduction Unit or VRU similar to the outfit which helped spread a public health model across Scotland and especially in Glasgow. 

But as SCCJR experts in their report stress, there is a lag between such work and falling violence. 

In their report, they said: “This divergent trend in violence from 2015 generated a very different political climate around the issue of violence in England and Wales compared to Scotland. 

“While Scotland retained a focus on the public health approach to violence prevention, in England and Wales – and London in particular – interviews with policymakers suggested a perceived need for a shift in policy direction.”

The public health model of combating violence, the authors stress, is not a silver bullet. It requires “close attentiveness to local context and need”. What works in a Scotland might not be right for London - or anywhere else. 

What matters, the SCCJR authors suggest, is connecting with communities and service providers and intervening before social problems lead to violence.

The big drops in violent crime in Scotland were a decade ago, as reflected in homicide statistics. Good practice has a lag. So do problems. 

Are we storing up issues now that could result in more deaths in years to come - and Scotland crawling back up those international homicide league tables?

The academics cited Scottish youth workers worrying about emerging trends, and especially growing poverty and the long-term effects of Covid and lockdown.

Recognising reductions, the scholars said: “Youth workers, and young people themselves, drew attention to new and emerging concerns relating to violence involving young people. These concerns were rooted in ongoing impact of poverty and disadvantage, the legacy of Covid-19, and the changing nature of youth culture.”

One social worker was quoted anonymously in the report warning of the impact of long-term poverty and lack of hope on youngsters. “People are just living day to day and just trying their best to get by and young people growing up in those situations just that’s what they see, that’s what they know and that’s the life that they will statistically go on to live,” the worker said. “And as a symptom of poverty young people join gangs.”

The report is called Safe Space for a good reason.  The authors summed up: “In recent years, a divergent trend has emerged between Scotland (where violence has remained relatively stable for the last seven years) and England and Wales (where violence appears to be increasing).
“In the aftermath of Covid-19 there are concerns about a resurgence in violence involving young people, with emerging issues around social media and mental health. 

“Despite positive changes, physical ‘safe spaces’ for children and young people are increasingly under threat due to financial constraints, and there is a need for youth practitioners and social media platforms to learn from young people about how to create digital ‘safe spaces’.”