Chicago Gangs Expert In Glasgow To Advise On Youth Crime

Leading gang specialists from Chicago will be visiting Glasgow and London this week to advise on how to deal with violence by mentoring young people.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has paid for Kenny Ruiz, head of youth interventions with the YMCA in Chicago, and Claude Robinson, head of Uhlich Children’s Advantage Network (Ucan), to fly over and spend the week meeting experts in the UK.

They will both be speaking at a conference organised by Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in Glasgow on Wednesday. Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, head of the VRU, said Scotland would not simply copy their projects but that he is keen to see how their work could be adapted here. Mr Carnochan visited the projects in Chicago in February to see first hand how the work was helping to bring down the city’s murder rate, which has dropped from around 600 in 2003 to around 450 a year.

Scotland’s murder rate for teenagers is five times higher than that of England and Wales, with the majority of offences concentrated in the Glasgow area. Around 5000 people a year are caught with knives or blades in the Strathclyde area. Mr Robinson said: “The ethnic issues we have here are not necessarily the problem in many parts of the UK but the duplication of the models is definitely applicable.

“Tessa Jowell, your Culture Minister, came out on the streets with us here and was very interested in our mentoring programmes using the arts and music.

“Ultimately some of the problems between Glasgow and Chicago may be different but the issues are the same. It’s young men from deprived, high-crime neighbourhoods and broken families. It’s about identifying their purpose in life and motivating them.”

He added that lessons could be learned from sharing the Chicago model: “We work with these young men weekly to identify their purpose in life and try to get them to work out who they are.”

This is not the first time that Glasgow has looked to other cities for guidance on how to deal with its crime problems. In February, a London organisation which specialises in tackling gang culture was hired in Glasgow to help the city get a handle on its own problems of conflict and violence.