 I can't believe how many people have come out on a horrible Wednesday night. So, thanks very much. Sorry. I'm here to tell you a story of hope. It's really difficult in Scotland to actually talk about anything that's really positive because we are technically Calvinists, aren't we? We'd rather say no than say yes. If it's a nice day tomorrow, it will rain tomorrow. And our favourite sweeties are fishermen's friends extra strong. We seem to think that we're doomed. But I'm here to tell you about a country that's a 42-year law for violence. When we started about over 10 years ago, I remember going to see somebody really, really senior in the prison service, and I said, I want to do violence reduction. And he gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit. And I never went back to see him because he said it's too big, don't bother. Well, it is big and it's really complex and it's really worth bothering about because I don't know, there'll be many people in here who might have been touched by violence, but I never want to meet another set of parents who've lost someone through murder. I never want to speak to someone like Moira Jones' family who lost her through a horrific crime. I never want to go into jail and speak to some young women or some young men who start their narrative where they see when I was eight or see when I was five or see when I was 11. Because the things that happen to them when they're young and the crime and the chaos and the poverty, you can't change. Even now, when I'm dealing with people later on, I can make it better and not worse. But I can't undo 20 years of chaos. I can just try and ameliorate it. So I'm going to talk. Actually, I showed this, I had this slide up this morning on my computer and my husband said, oh my God, I can't believe you get invited anywhere. You're the most depressing person I know. And he said, and it's surprising they said that anybody's married you, including me. So, but I'm going to sort of have a canter through this. I've only got 15 minutes, so if this is a bit glib, you can ask me any questions later on. Firstly, we're allowed to argue about this. You can disagree with anything that I say as long as you come up with an alternative way of doing stuff. And secondly, I'm not going to talk about many stats because I genuinely believe this. If you torture them enough, they'll confess to anything. And I've been in the police a very long time and I'm an expert at it. So I'm not going to talk about much. So this is actually what's happening. I've not got any figures down there, but crime is coming down, absolutely. And you would expect demand to be coming down as well, but it's not, it's gone up. And you'd expect a prison population because crime is coming down to have gone down as well. And generally, it's remained the same. Although our young offenders population has gone down quite dramatically and it's a testament to some of the work that's gone on there that they've managed to prevent young people coming out the criminal justice system. It's something we can be hugely proud of and we'll see the benefits of that in coming years. And what's driving it, and this is my personal opinion, is fear, welfare changes, poverty, public sector reform, mental health issues and an aging population. We live in a complex society. It's, you know, there are some wicked problems that we're going to have to deal with in future years. And the police are not always set up to deal with it. We need great research to tell us how to do best evidence-based practice so that we can use the resources we have to effect greater change. So, this is what happened to us. I'd been away from Scotland for about, well, 18 years that I'd come back about 11 years ago from West Mercia, which was a really lovely constabulary and, you know, Worcester and whatever. I think we've had three murders in three years. And it was, I mean, it was a real rarity, you know, and people were really, oh, that's been a murder. And then suddenly I came back to Scotland and I'd been away for 18 years. And I realised it wasn't just we had one murder, but we had another murder and another murder. We actually had four in one weekend. And there was a story in the Daily Record and it was of a young 16-year-old boy who had bled to death in a gutter. And he'd been stabbed once, and a 74-year-old woman had come out and she'd cuddled on whilst he bled to death, crying for his mum. And I thought, you know something, this is our Rosa Parks moment. You know the bit when people stand up and say, we've had enough and nothing happened because people were enured to violence. Does anybody in this audience think that we didn't have a problem of violence? No. And I decided we'd do something different. So I went away because I'm really, really sad and I wrote a report for the chief constable and pretty much what I said was, chief, despite the best 30 years of policing, we've made he-ho difference to preventing violence. Now he was delighted, as you can imagine. You know what, we'd filled the prisons, but can I tell you, that experiment's not working. You know, if you think that jailing people is going to solve this, then frankly, America would have no crime because they've tried that experiment. They jailed 3.5 million people a year. It doesn't work. We have to think of things that are different. And then this came out and in 2004, it was the United Nations peace monitor. And what it said was, Scotland was the most violent country in Europe and Glasgow was the most violent city. Now you can imagine, visit Scotland, we're delighted. You know, come to Scotland, get chipped. You know, I do usually say that I quite like to put Columbia on there because it made us look good. And then I got invited to Columbia. There was nothing I could do for them. You know, and it's really interesting, when you're faced with this, you have it, you can either, you can do two things, you can either say, these other countries can't be the coordinate right, or you can do that thing, you know that the zeitgeist. You know that the AA thing, my name is Scotland and we have a problem. And I think we did. I think we managed to carral enough people at that time to say that we had a real problem in Scotland and we needed to do something different. And I'm really pleased that we did because we had surgeons in the A&E departments. This isn't just about me, I didn't do this. In fact, not even a fraction of it on my own, I met some hugely brilliant people across the whole of Scotland who really tried to change things. And you know, they were saying five stab wounds a night and Glasgow, on the firm of the day, on average got about four stab wounds a night. Now they get, I mean, they normally get about three a week now. And I know that sounds probably quite, you know, three a week, still not good. But can I tell you, it's a lot better than four a night. So, we decided we'd do something different because previously if you think about trying to address crime, we used the criminal justice model, which was you reported a crime, I then recorded it, we then investigated it, and then maybe caught someone and someone went to jail and we've been doing that for hundreds of years and that's why the prisons are full. But we decided we'd do something different with violence, we decided we'd try and look at it like a disease. And we tried to think about it just like measles, how you caught it, who was at risk, what actually worked in trying to prevent it and then when we found what would prevent it, we'd scale it up. Scotland is the only country that took on a public health model to reduce violence in the world. I'm the only police member of the World Health Organization and I'm incredibly proud that we did that because people didn't say, oh that will never work. They actually thought, you know something, let's try something different because what we've done's not worked. So this is what it is, this is public health in a nutshell. Surveillance, first find out what you don't know. Secondly, identify your risk and protective factors and get some research, and that's why we need people like yourselves who give me some of the evidence base to then decide what I'm going to do. And then, develop interventions and sometimes you need to invent them and you also sometimes have to fail. I have failed spectacularly things, I've got a whole lecture I do in failure, I quite like it, it appeals to my Calvinist thing. And then what you do is you scale it up. So that's public health and that's what we did. And surveillance was really important because that line across the bottom was pretty much all our violence levels, our violent crime levels, the stuff that we recorded in the police. And then what I said to the A&E consultants, could you just count the amount of people who are coming in as a result of violence? And this was a real figure. So when the chief constable was standing up and saying, crime is up 2%, down 3%, up 5%, down 6%, frankly it made no difference because there was a whole section of the community out there who were thinking one or two things, you're either a liar or you don't know what's happening. Because there was a whole range of people who didn't want to report crime for a whole range of reasons, sometimes they were a victim, sometimes they were a fender, sometimes they didn't trust the police. There was a whole range of reasons. I don't commit violence, I don't think. We needed to flush it out and we actually needed to try and get people to increase the amount that we knew about because otherwise we couldn't deal with it because that's like, you know, we were deploying police officers based on 30% of the jigsaw puzzle. So it was impossible, so surveillance was really important. And then we started to look at what do you do then? So we started to look at the teachable moments when we could start to effect change. Now the teachable moments for you will be tomorrow when you decide you're never going to a public lecture because I was dead boring. Or you'll wake up in a Saturday morning, you know that when you've been out at night and you've drank too much wine and you wake up and you think, I am never drinking again. You know, that's your teachable moment, prosheco en dichlimenti, the motivation to change. And public health says you do four things. You do look at primary prevention. If you really want to change something, you do primary prevention, secondary prevention, tertiary prevention and changing social norms. Now I'm just going to talk about a few of them really quickly because I don't have a great deal of time. First off, parent time. Kids follow their parents. Great parenting is as close as it gets to being magic without being magic. In the early years work that's going on in Scotland will reap rewards way beyond the money that's put in just now because I've got so many kids who don't have that good parenting model and there's a big campaign just now to start to look at a kindergarten system for kids just now up until the age of seven where we think about play and try and develop all the skills that help us get through life without bumping into violence because early years is where you get communication, problem-solving, team-working, empathy. These are all the skills that you have that help you get through life without bumping into violence and drugs and chaos and help you make good decisions about your life and if you don't get it, it's really difficult later on because when I look at some of the adverse childhood events that some of the people that I have having their background it's pretty overwhelming. If you have one or two of these, you might be able to survive and get through it. If you have three or four or five, your chances of developing alcoholism, heart disease, and a whole range of other problems is hugely raised and the people I work with have every single one of them in their background. Their lives are incredibly complex. Before they even get to school or they're dealing with a complexity that most of us don't even understand and we will look at things like some of their life experience the first two years is when babies' brains grow and develop and if you're living in chaos and stress that really affects you and what we know is that when we've got some of these kids who are growing up in domestic violence and addiction and parents have mental health problems and there's neglect for normal kids, if you're at rest and then you get a threat you get the fight or flight reaction and then you become exhausted and you recover and then you're at rest again for the kids who have brought up in that chaotic environment they remain at that fight or flight now you will all have met these people and pubs you know the guys that you meet in the pub and they're always in the balls of their feet you know that they're always in the balls of their feet and then you bump into them and you spill their pint and they're like you know it's the big movements who you're looking at you know what are you doing because they're always at that fight or flight reaction and it's really really difficult to try and to try and deal with these kids in a classroom because they become anxious they're disengaged they're poor learners they have this over-preserving life-brain because if you're a kid and you're brought up in domestic violence every time you hear the rattle of the door you're not sure whether someone's going to come in and they're going to beat your mother there's going to be food in the fridge they'll live lives of chaos and it's incredibly difficult so for me parenting has always been one of the biggest strands of the violence reduction strategy and there's some great work now by Mark Bellis who said that if we could reduce some of the adverse childhood events we could reduce violence by 60% in Scotland early sex by 33% heroin crack cane use by 60% when you think that violence costs about 4% of the GDP of this country now I don't know what it is now since the recession but it used to be about 160 billion a year imagine what you could spend that money on so this is really worth doing if you're not convinced by the moral cost of doing this even the financial cost should start to get you thinking about why it's important everybody takes a responsibility in this because no one is safe until everybody is safe we all have a responsibility to do this this is not my responsibility it's not a public service responsibility it's ourselves, it's Scots and it's community members and it's family members to try and make this country the safest country in the world but I know that lots of the kids I can't undo lots of this stuff but what I do know in some of the evidence base that's coming out now is that if we build resilience in these kids it can help them overcome some of the challenges that they have in their background the Swedish Children's Commissioner said to me can what you need is dandelion children and I was like I don't know what dandelion children are and she says these are children who are brought up in really dreadful circumstances who thrive despite the worst of circumstances and what makes a difference to them is resilience and a good role model in their life 60% of the households in Glasgow who are single occupancy are single parent households I've got whole groups of young men who are growing up without any idea about what it is to be a man in 21st century Scotland now I'm quite a strident feminist who do I know in but I realise that you guys are really important and there is something about masculinity and what it is to be a man that I think we need to have a conversation with and particularly with some of our young men because they don't know what it is to have a good relationship they don't know what it is to deal with women in a different way how to interact with a world without thinking that you have to you know solve everything by violence and this is tertiary prevention because obviously we still have to deal with those who are affected so um I'm just going to talk about a few things so we'd um I'd been talking to dentists because if I punch you in the face not that I'm likely to the first thing you lost was your teeth and I thought I wonder what dentists say you know and I went up to a group in Aberdeen and I'd said to the dentists I said has anybody ever seen domestic violence in their chair and this guy put up his hand and he said he said oh I had a woman in my chair he said two weeks ago he said she had cigarette burns on the top of her mouth where somebody had stubbed cigarettes out in her mouth I said right I said what did you say to her and he said I said nothing because I didn't know what to say so we decided we'd train all the vets with them Dr Christine Goodall who runs medics against violence here and we'd train them to intervene when someone came in as a result of domestic violence you know that this isn't an injury I would normally see in my chair you're in a safe place they would ask they would document they would refer onwards to specialists even if the victim didn't want to report right then we had some of the documentation so that if she decided to do it later on she would have some evidence base it's been the easiest thing I've ever to do because dentists I don't know whether you've noticed lots of dentists really talk to you you know I mean normally when your mouth is full of cotton wool but they were ideally placed to ask people and facial injury is actually one of the most common outcomes of violence so it was an easy thing to do and then we also decided to train vets we put every homicide on a database and we started to look at the backgrounds and particularly for women for violence against women and what we found was lots of the cases where there was real serious violence against women there was animal abuse in the back I'm conscious that you might have to edit this out but we had people who would squeeze guinea pigs to death in front of them saying you leave and this is what I'll do at you they would break dogs legs you have no idea about how horrendous domestic abuse is until you read some of the stories and the narratives behind it and you realise the control that people exert over it so we decided we'd train the vets because what happened was the women generally took the dogs or the animals to the vets and the vets it was a chance to intervene now it's a really complex course because you've trying to pick up non-accidental injury but again the vets were fantastic the first time we did the course I had someone who phoned me up on the Monday it says you're never going to believe this she says I had a woman in and a dog wear an inconsistent three breaks on its leg and she said and I thought I'm just going to have a try now it didn't quite work out the way she wanted but she said I thought it was an integrity test by the violence reduction unit I said oh yes we sit outside and break dogs legs and send them in just to see if you're intervening although I haven't taken it off my tactical menu yet but do you know that you can get people to do great things the fire service the fire service are no longer doing point and squirt because we're not trying chips quite so much which is a good thing on a whole range of levels people so they decided but what they're doing is they're putting in smoke detectors on people's house people like fire service and the fire service decided that they were also going to get trained in picking up signs of violence in the house and they were also going to intervene I've met so many people across a whole range of lives hairdressers, beauticians who've all wanted to do something because this is about creating a group of people who all want to say something so I had a bit of an argument on the BBC where we were talking about training hairdressers because you get clumps of hair missing from people and we trained some of the hairdressers to intervene in a really low key way and this woman phoned up and she said I disagree she said I can't believe you're doing that she said these women just why don't you go to the hairdressers and look good and I said what if that's the only time someone's ever said are you all right you know you don't have to put up with this you can there's a different there's something else we can do here Adam Smith said way back in 1776 the empathy was the glue that kept society together see the standard you walk by is a standard you accept I get myself in loads of really difficult situations let's not mention football you know because I just think we all have to try and do something different oh zero I'm at zero can I just put that last one up this is my zero two years ago when we had the calm wealth games I had a this is we took I had a bit of brinksmanship with the calm wealth games did you know that if you had any criminal conviction you weren't allowed to work at the calm wealth games so we flattened your community centres we built velodromes that you couldn't afford to go into in areas that you were going to have be looking at for the next 20 30 years and yet you weren't allowed to you weren't allowed to be there and so I decided I would um I'd have a game of brinksmanship and said I think that's dreadful we should really we should really do something and Scottish government were very good and gave me some money and I did the most unusual job descriptions ever and I'd put a job advert out in alcoholics anonymous narcotics anonymous the jails the homeless and the girls who were working in the sex industry and I said come and work at the calm wealth games and then we did interviews and it was that interview thing you know that you know we did that old interview question why should we take you and this girl who was about seven stone and had been in drugs and a whole range of other things she says oh I wouldn't take me so we did you know and we had a guy who walked five miles on his birthday to come for the interview and we took him too and we are the most motley group we were pretty much all addicted we work an abstinence based programme and we took them and we worked at the calm wealth games we navigate them for 18 months 80% of them are in full time jobs and I had a phone call from a journalist who said to me can you tell me because we paid them as well because you need to earn square money this isn't all about volunteering your life needs to be predictable, understandable and manageable and you need to have a sense of hope and this journalist phoned me and she said can you tell me why you're working with these bad boys and I was like here we go again and I said to her can you tell me what you tack this is this week as you'll you'll have to guess what newspaper this was I said is it welfare scroungers or you don't want me getting those bad people jobs I said because it's one or the other and I could hear at the end of the phone saying damn and she says it's welfare scroungers I said well I'm getting them to be part of the wealth creation of Scotland because lots of the people there make themselves really hard to like and really hard to love and they've done serious jail time but between them they had 147 children and I really love their kids and I need their kids to see their mums and dads going out to work because that's how I really think that we're going to change Scotland in the future and make it better for everyone so for all of you I know there's some great people on this audience who've who'll make a contribution going forward it's a great journey to be on and um I hope I'm not going too much over time thanks very much