Glasgow’s history of crime and policing is longer, and more surprising, than its hard-man reputation suggests. The city created one of Britain’s first modern police forces: the City of Glasgow Police was established in 1800, nearly three decades before London’s Metropolitan Police, and served the city until it was merged into Strathclyde Police in 1975. Victorian policing follows its officers through the overcrowded wynds and closes of the old town, while the Sheriff Court and Barlinnie, opened in 1882, complete the machinery of justice.

Some of the city’s cases became famous far beyond Scotland. Oscar Slater was convicted of murder in 1909 on flimsy evidence and spent almost two decades in prison before his conviction was quashed in 1928, after a campaign supported by Arthur Conan Doyle. Peter Manuel, one of Scotland’s most notorious killers, was hanged at Barlinnie on 11 July 1958, and the unsolved murders attributed to Bible John in the late 1960s still haunt the city. Famous crimes gathers many more.

Gang culture has its own long history, from the razor gangs of the 1920s and 1930s, confronted by Chief Constable Percy Sillitoe between 1931 and 1943, to the Calton Tongs and the Ice Cream Wars of the 1980s. H. Kingsley Long’s 1935 novel No Mean City fixed the image of a violent Glasgow in the public mind, and the career of Arthur Thompson showed how organised crime adapted to the post-war city.

The story does not end in violence. In 2005 Strathclyde Police set up the Violence Reduction Unit, which treated violence as a public health problem rather than simply a matter for enforcement. Its approach has been studied around the world, and it is part of the reason the city that was once labelled the murder capital of Europe now tells a different story.

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