Youth violence is a serious problem in London. To help the Metropolitan Police Service tackle this complex issue we had to raise awareness of a complicated legal principle known as Joint Enterprise, which states that if you have knowledge of or are connected to a crime you can be charged with it. Our challenge was daunting given our audience were hard to reach 13-15 year olds in London who were on the periphery of gun and knife crime, we had a limited budget and only six weeks to get the message out by the school holidays when youth violence traditionally peaked. To achieve this we embarked on an unorthodox process of co-creation between creative, media and the teenagers themselves, involving them as consultants, co-creators and critics.

The creative idea was an interactive murder mystery hosted on Facebook, about the fictional murder of Deon. Six short films told the story of the roles different characters played and viewers were challenged to guess Who killed Deon?, the point being that anyone involved was charged with murder under Joint Enterprise.

The campaign was a success. We reached our audience achieving 135,371 unique visitors, 4.5 times more than estimated, our message was clear with 59% understanding ‘you can be charged with murder even if you didn’t actually kill someone’ and we achieved 6 times the engagement for the average Facebook campaign. We launched on time and within budget, reaching our audience 5 times more efficiently that originally budgeted. But importantly crime has a bigger societal impact. Of those who saw the campaign 41% agreed ‘Don’t get involved with weapons/ guns/ knives’.

But the real effects of this campaign are future facing, and its true value lies in the hope that the teenagers influenced who heard the message will act on it in years to come. Propensity to change behaviour is therefore critical to success. We know anecdotally from the youngsters themselves and the officers who are still using the campaign as an educational resource in classrooms that the campaign is working. To help prevent a few people entering a life of crime has a significant economic value. Our campaign would have paid for itself if we have simply avoided 7.3 prisoner years. To achieve an ROI of 1.5.9 we would only need four young people to change their behaviour. And we hope this paper has been able to prove this effect beyond reasonable doubt.