Former Sandhurst Army officer to tackle violent crime in Cleveland

John Holden is the head of the Cleveland Unit for the Reduction of Violence (CURV), a local partnership set up last year and funded by the Home Office after work by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner.

It is responsible for delivering a ‘whole system’ approach to tackling violence, bringing together key partners to identify the local drivers and root causes, and agree and implement a multi-agency response to them.

John Holden cuts a pretty imposing figure when we meet at the Cleveland Police headquarters, in Hemlington, Middlesbrough, and is also described as something of a talker.

He has no trouble filling the hour and-a-half spent with him and confidently sets out the vision for CURV as he sees it.  And it’s a big job he has to do.

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Mr Holden, who did his training in Sandhurst, is a former Army officer who served in the likes of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Northern Ireland, working his way up to lieutenant colonel rank.

He led the regional response to serious floods in South Yorkshire in 2019, later becoming head of emergency planning for the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, where he worked for three years.

“It was a bold move to take this job when it came up as I had never worked in the world of violence reduction, although I could see areas of commonality where my experience in emergency planning – particularly in partnership working – would have a crossover,” he says.

The 54-year-old, originally from Malton, North Yorkshire, who previously received an MBE for his time serving as a deputy commander in the Royal Horse Artillery, took up his post at CURV last November.

“In terms of violence reduction units, we have gone through almost a birth really, we are the 19th or 20th in the country,” he says.

“It’s there to provide a strategic, long term vision.

“The primary aim is to build partnerships with other organisations and work on evidence-based approaches to intervention, not gut feelings.

“That takes time and it is a long journey.”

A strategic needs assessment has now been produced, which examines the scale of the problem, along with a strategy plotting a way forward up until March 2025, both of which are soon to be published.

Currently in Cleveland one in 20 crimes falls into the serious violence category with the challenge this places on authorities deemed to be “one of the most significant in England”.

Hospital admissions as a result of assault by a sharp object are also among the highest in the country.

There is also a strong link to deprivation – 16% of all serious violence in the borough happens in just two wards, Central and Newport in Middlesbrough.

The documents place a question mark over whether violence has become “normalised” in some communities with children speaking of regular experiences of it.

“If the community in which you live has known nothing but a level of anti-social behaviour and violent crime for such a long time, at what point do you become desensitised to it, become part of it, or change your life so much in order to avoid it,” Mr Holden comments.

He recounts an instance where a police officer told him about a young girl who had witnessed a fatal stabbing, who appeared not to be as traumatised as might be expected since she had seen other knife attacks.

“I was at a conference the other day and heard about a campaign aimed at young people which was basically saying ‘you deserve better’ and you have a right to live, work and go to school free from the fear of consequences of violence, because that is not normal,” he goes on.

“This is what we are aiming for.”

Mr Holden says existing ways of working by authorities in this area need to be challenged if the evidence shows they don’t work and new solutions found.

“I spent my first two months hardly in the office and just going around meeting various partners, those providing interventions and community groups and representatives,” he explains when asked about his first experiences in the role.

“Primarily that’s police, fire, health in various forms and the local authorities covering adult social services, children’s services and community safety partnerships.

“There’s also probation, prison, youth offending teams and education and schools.

“There has been a lot done to spread the word and develop and understand the needs in respect of addressing serious violence.”

Mr Holden is supported by a lead delivery officer – “the doing stuff” – who deals with the commissioning of interventions and helping get them off the ground, and a lead analytical officer, while further recruits are on their way.

The context to much of this effort is the serious violence duty, which came into force in January and which makes councils and local services work together to share information and target interventions to prevent and reduce serious violence such as murders and stabbings.

It has now been agreed the CURV will manage the serious violence duty on behalf of the various statutory bodies that are compelled by it.

CURV currently has an overall £1m a year budget, based on population size, much smaller than some other areas, with the aim being to minimise its running costs and maximise its impact.

“It’s partly about identifying where there is a gap in provision and harm is resulting,” says Mr Holden.

“It is for CURV to pilot a response and then hopefully go to partners and say this works – if you take it on and run with it, it will reduce violent crime and the demand on your services.”

In its first year it commissioned 26 interventions through various projects, spending about £800,000.

This included focused work in Hemlington aimed at deterring anti-social behaviour and related violence, knife use reduction strategies, various sports projects aimed at engaging young people, neuro linguistic programmes, while £200,000 was given to local councils to help with night-time economy crime reduction.

Mr Holden is happy to describe the CURV as the “new kid on the block” and admits there may have been reservations from some partners with already overstretched resources when a new organisation with a pot of money and a plan comes along, but has the potential to cause more work for them.

“When your nose is down and you are firefighting because you are bereft of resources, it is very hard to look up and to notice that someone is running on your side in parallel with you,” he says.

“I have been clear that we don’t just want to come along and make noise, we needed buy-in from executive and delivery level.

“The first point of system change is to bring genuine, authentic collaboration and also bring in a community voice – communities affected need to have a say in the shaping of individual interventions.

“We’re not here to reinvent the wheel, there is a structure already out there, and we need to add value and provide leadership.”

Mr Holden says police can’t arrest their way out of the problems with serious violence.

“That will suppress and buy space and a little bit of time and if you do it wrong you are going to alienate yourself from communities you need to work with,” he says.

“The police get that.

“The longer term building of restoring a degree of normality and what is acceptable behaviour – the Cleveland we want to live in – again needs buy-in, working with the agencies, the voluntary sector, the intervention providers and working in partnership with the police.”

Mr Holden describes a scheme being piloted in Redcar and Cleveland which is targeting families in most need and specifically children aged from 0 to 5 to prepare them for school reception so they can manage potentially concerning behaviours and become productive learners.

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“If you get things from the very start wrong there is a greater chance that a young person will make wrong choices later in life,” he says.

“I won’t see the result of some of these interventions and there is no overnight quick fix for the violent crime happening on a daily basis.

“My presence is not immediately going to change those [violence] figures.

“Stopping the crime and dealing with it when it happens, that’s police, enforcement, but we need to make sure all the drivers that are feeding the demand, those taps start to be turned off.”