Scotland's top cop teams up with kids to wage war on political failure

TYRELL Davis-Douglin was almost dragged into a life of gang violence. His brains saved him, though. “I’m from a crime hotspot,” he says. “It wasn’t a good community. A lot of young people are involved in anti-social behaviour.”

Davis-Douglin got caught up in a dangerous world as a kid. It chills him to think what could have happened to him. He could easily have become either a victim or perpetrator of violent crime. But he’s now 22 and a successful rapper, known as “The Prospect Panther”, who also mentors marginalised kids.

However, Davis-Douglin’s most significant role is working alongside Niven Rennie, once one of Scotland’s leading police officers and head of the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), acclaimed for halving Glasgow knife crime.

The former chief superintendent has quit his job as VRU lead to head a new organisation with one aim: waging war on poverty. That is the only way to cut crime and give the country’s poorest kids a chance, he believes. The organisation is called the Hope Collective. Davis-Douglin is at its heart. He has even taken its work to Downing Street.

The Hope Collective is about to make a splash on the national stage. Ahead of the next General Election it is producing a manifesto designed to break the cycle of poverty and offending. It will go to all four UK governments. Davis-Douglin says politicians who don’t act on the Hope Collective’s recommendations will face consequences at the ballot box.

Tyrell Davis-Douglin, who raps under the alias The Prospect Panther, joined Niven Rennie in jumpstarting the Hope Collective which aims to wage war on poverty for the betterment of future generations (Image: Newsquest)

Years as a police officer taught Rennie this truth: crime is a symptom of poverty. Tackle poverty and you tackle crime. But politicians don’t prioritise the poor, he feels, so crime festers, and it is kids who suffer most. They are the ones who stab or get stabbed.

Rennie’s solution is revolutionary. For his entire life, politicians have failed to solve violent crime. So, because crime and poverty affect young people the most – as victims and perpetrators – then, Rennie says, let young people come up with the solutions. Their solutions will become the Hope Collective’s manifesto that goes to government.

The Hope Collective team is travelling throughout Britain this year, speaking to thousands of young people about what they think needs done to fix the problems wrecking their lives.

Mental health, education, policing, racism, sexism and unemployment all vector into the causes of youth crime. So, Rennie and Davis-Douglin will be asking young people what they want when it comes to issues like accessing psychiatric services, school exclusions, institutional racism, poverty and jobs.

Nearly all the kids who will take part come from marginalised communities. Many will have got mixed up in gangs and offended. If we care about kids and want young people to succeed and not drift into criminality, then who better to ask, Rennie believes.

Beginnings

THE Hope Collective wouldn’t exist without Scotland’s experiment with a public health approach to crime spearheaded by the VRU. It began when Glasgow still had the unenviable title of “Europe’s murder capital”.

“Violence, addiction and all the other social problems we contend with are driven by poverty,” says Rennie. The VRU worked with alienated young offenders, helping them change their lives through opening up opportunities in education and employment. Offenders who had turned their own lives around were used as mentors, and there was mental health support.

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While the VRU’s work was ongoing in Scotland, down in London like minds were trying to get to grips with youth offending in the wake of the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor by two brothers aged 12 and 13. Gary Trowsdale was one of those like minds. He ran the Damilola Taylor Trust and became intrigued by the successes in Scotland under the VRU.

Trowsdale was also lead adviser to Westminster’s all-party parliamentary commission on youth violence. He had one objective: “Finding true solutions to the plague of violence impacting young lives. The underlying issues underpinning the escalation of violence were clearly poverty and inequalities, and as such only a public health approach could hope to create solutions.”

Trowsdale picked up the phone to Rennie at the VRU. Today, the Hope Collective is the result of that call. Rennie is now chair of the Hope Collective and Trowsdale the director. Tyrell Davis-Douglin came on board to chair its youth management committee.

The Hope Collective’s work is based around what is called “hackathons”, a term first coined in Silicon Valley for tech entrepreneurs brainstorming ideas. The ideas the Hope Collective want come from children on the margins providing solutions to the problems ruining their lives.

The organisation's work is based around 'hackathons' where children on the margins get their say in policy (Image: Newsquest)

Rennie had become becoming dissatisfied with his VRU work. His budget from the Scottish Government was limited and that meant “we had to make sure what we said complied with what government wanted us to say”.

Too often, he feels, the work seemed to be about photo opportunities “for government ministers”. While the Scottish Government was generous, the VRU’s £1 million budget wasn’t enough.

“We didn’t have the money to scale up the work we were doing,” says Rennie.

The Hope Collective is partnering with big business and philanthropic organisations to raise the capital needed to spread the philosophy of Scotland’s VRU across Britain.

Message

RENNIE, who is also professor of policy at the University of East London, says: “Our prime message is: we must work together to tackle poverty and inequality. We must invest in young people. We must stop making young people the butt of our complaints and say they just run amok in gangs.

“We complain about young people without thinking of the fact that we’ve closed all their youth clubs, withdrawn funding for services that support them. To compound that, the political choices we’ve made around austerity, Brexit and the cost of living makes things worse for them. A measure that I use is the rise of foodbanks. I’d never seen one 10 years ago. We’ve allowed poverty to widen.

“Young people have no hope or opportunity. They get involved in things they shouldn’t, take drugs and alcohol to take the edge off, and we judge and punish them, and the prison population just gets bigger. How do we change that? We give young people a voice. They have the answers.”

Trowsdale, Rennie’s Hope Collective partner, says his work running the Damilola Taylor Trust showed him how poverty “underpins” violent youth crime. Many offenders come from deeply dysfunctional homes, lack education, and are exposed to drugs.

“These classic symptoms of poverty are never discussed,” Trowsdale says, adding that young offenders are labelled “gang members” but the poverty which blights their lives is never highlighted. “We’re going to drive the narrative away from the blame that’s attached to people from poor communities. These communities are alienated. We must start looking at the root problem of poverty.”

Trowsdale says poverty effectively creates “crime by design” thanks to political decisions. Stop talking about crime, start talking about poverty.

That’s the public health approach to cutting offending. Poverty is an illness, crime the symptom.

Abuse

AN industry has grown up around youth crime, Trowsdale believes, which does little to address real problems. It has led to “big salaries and well-paid executives” in charities. When it comes to funding, there is a “competitive cut-throat marketplace”, he says, adding: “Organisations are pitted against each other. Funding quangos hold an awful lot of power.

“Politicians want to talk about youth crime but they didn’t want to do anything about poverty, so a youth violence ‘industry’ was created that’s fed more mouths than it’s saved. It’s a kind of abuse. We’re changing that model.”

What resulted, Trowsdale says, “was a narrative of blame. We weren’t looking at how to solve the root problem. Nobody in politics ever goes near the issue of poverty. It can’t be fixed in four year electoral cycles so they never put thought into it”. Given the years he spent working in parliament, his criticism is telling.

Kid-centric

RENNIE and Trowsdale are fearless in putting kids who have committed crime, or been in gangs, at the heart of their project despite the risk of tabloid backlash.

“The very nub of the issue,” says Rennie, “is young kids with potential who simply from birth are set on a path from which they have no escape – a lifetime of poverty with no positive role model to assist. Life becomes a struggle, every day a battle to survive. They kick out against a system that provides them with so little, while they view others living a stone’s throw away with a completely different life.

“The next step is misusing alcohol or drugs, getting involved in criminality, becoming a member of a gang – often the first family they’ve had, their first sense of status. Throughout my life as a police officer, I saw many such young people. We arrested them and they were sent to prison, labelled. For many that becomes a life sentence.

“Once they have a conviction they find it hard to get a job. I always knew there was something wrong, even the stupidity of the cost of prison, compared to the cost of providing services to assist and prevent crime, made no sense to me.

“Working in the VRU, I saw first-hand what can happen when you give kids a chance, when you don’t judge and label them. When you provide support, make them believe in themselves, they respond. It’s not easy, there are years of trauma to overcome. But what a privilege to see them flourish.

“I’ve often heard it said ‘what about their victims?’. These kids are victims. In reality, many perpetrators of crime have been victims themselves. Our current system has failed over generations – it’s about time we challenged it.”

Rennie says 1 per cent of Scotland experiences 65% of violent crime; 64% of Scotland’s prisoners suffered at least six “adverse childhood experiences”, he points out. “These are people in our poorer communities. The worse your start in life, the worse your outcomes are likely to be. These kids need hope, opportunity and something to aspire to.”

Margins

TROWSDALE says that the Hope Collective’s policy of speaking to kids who have been in gangs or have “lived experience of the way marginalised communities are policed and treated by the criminal justice system is a majorly important part of the mix in putting an authentic plan in place where solutions are concerned”.

Stop and search simply alienates kids from police, he says. “It’s dehumanising.” The war on drugs has failed and “causes more problems than it solves”.

Rennie says 1,137 young Scottish men died of a drug overdose or suicide while on community payback orders between 2013/20. “We’re failing our children with our Dickensian values.”

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On drugs, he says: “What we currently do doesn’t work. We need a fresh approach. Locking kids up is certainly wrong – being wholly opposed to trialling a different response is wrong. We need a more compassionate, educated approach.”

The Hope Collective will spend 2023 speaking to young people to formulate its set of policies to deliver to government. Trowsdale says youth violence is an “establishment-created phenomenon. It’s a symptom of poverty but nobody mentions that”.

Network

THE Hope Collective has created a network of experts on issues like race, employment, crime, mental health and housing to help them sculpt the ideas that young people come up with during hackathons into workable policies. There are prison governors, economists, criminologists, teachers, doctors, and civil servants all lending their services.

The Professional Footballers’ Association is supporting them. Scores of youth organisations across Britain are working with them and helping to get young people to come to their brainstorming sessions. Trowsdale says the manifesto that emerges will be called “Reimagining a fairer society through the eyes of young people”.

And what if politicians take no notice? “Look, we’ve a General Election coming up,” says Trowsdale. The organisation won’t pull its punches politically.

Rennie says money raised from big business and philanthropists means they won’t be reliant on “government handouts in order to give hope to young people written off by society”. The Hope Collective is talking to “big private investors, big foundations”. If politicians fail to implement their ideas, donations from industry and philanthropists will allow them to start projects on their own.

Remarkably, given the Hope Collective’s Scottish roots, the SNP is paying the least attention to its work. Manchester’s Labour mayor Andy Burnham has leant support, and the Hope Collective has been to Number 10.

Politics

RENNIE says his public health approach makes financial sense for politicians. “Instead of kids costing society money in prison, they end up working and paying taxes.” Politicians fear admitting poverty is the cause of crime, as that would mean spending money tackling inequality, and accusations of going soft on offenders. Rennie thinks it would take 10 years to see real social change. “If you spend money having less offenders, you end up with less victims,” he adds.

Trowsdale admits that some corporations will lend their support as a “tickbox exercise in social responsibility”, but he is happy to do whatever is needed to “weaponise hope”.

'If you spend money having less offenders, you end up with less victims' (Image: Newsquest)

Trowsdale sees the Hope Collective becoming a mass movement – a sort of modern-day Chartist movement demanding social change. Already 3,000 marginalised young people have taken part, despite the Hope Collective only now coming to public attention.

“It’s almost like a civil uprising,” Trowsdale says. The end goal is to make every citizen think of the waste of young people’s lives through poverty and crime. “It takes a village to raise a child. We all have responsibility to tackle these problems,” he adds.

Hackathons

SO, what happens at these hackathons? They have only really started, but just two weeks ago in Hull, traveller children and Syrian refugee children focused on racism in poor communities. One solution they came up with was more school lessons designed to bring cultures together. An idea like that will then go to the experts and professionals working with the Hope Collective. They will turn it into practical policies for government.

Other ideas included making parks safer so kids can get exercise for mental health; better teaching around social media; more classes on life skills like paying bills; adult classes for fathers and brothers about misogyny; professional training for teachers around the cultures of immigrant children; schemes to get marginalised children reading; and using male mentors as father-figure role models for one-parent families.

Most kids raise the problem of accessing mental health support. Waiting lists are exceptionally long. Young people suggest trauma specialists in schools after hours to support kids at risk of exclusion due to mental health problems. “You can’t argue with these ideas,” says Trowsdale. “They’re simple common sense, out of the mouths of babes. We’re a disruptor organisation. We won’t talk the same language of failure as the establishment.”

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Rennie adds: “We’ve been talking about these problems for years and everybody nods but nothing changes. This is like-minded people getting together, saying enough, we need to do things differently.”

So, what does success look like? “There’s no one level of success,” Rennie says. “It’s about one child at a time and then a great snowball taking off down a hill that changes the narrative.”

Trowsdale adds: “There’s no shame in wanting a utopian outcome because all the solutions are hidden in plain sight. It’s not rocket science. That’s been my frustration for years. We can change this.”

Truth

JASMIN Aden’s life symbolises the kind of change Trowsdale wants. Now 25, she was written off at school. The child of refugees, she and other young black girls “were classified as underachievers”.

Today, she’s a graduate working for the refugee youth charity One Community Scotland in Glasgow, and helps the Hope Collective source ideas from young people. Aden wants young marginalised people to feel able to speak honestly about problems they face, and decisions that need taken to improve their lives. “We see older people speak on behalf of young people. It’s essential young people speak their own truth.”

The work of Aden and Tyrell Davis-Douglin is indispensable for the Hope Collective. Without them marshalling young people to take part in the hackathons the organisation just wouldn’t function.

Davis-Douglin – who uses his rap The Prospect Panther to send out positive messages to marginalised kids – says: “We’re voicing exactly what we want in our communities, placing that in a report to the people in charge, and if we don’t see any reflection of what we’ve suggested then we’ll not be voting for them. It’s about holding people to account. If you don’t listen and take us seriously, we’re going to use our voting power.”

This is a “big movement” that’s under way, he says.