Ask a Glasgow police officer or social worker about youth crime and they look around the room for wood to touch - because youth crime figures are the ones nobody wants to jinx.

Because the numbers, nearly all the numbers, keep going down - by a lot.

"It's a trend now," says Sean McKendrick, Glasgow City Council's head of criminal justice, looking over his latest annual report.

"Only a minority of young people offend and a very big percentage of them only offend once or twice.

"So there is a very small percentage you really want to worry about."

As some newspaper headlines shout about "feral" youngsters who are out of control, the actual figures on real crimes tell a completely different story of Glasgow.

Take the total number of child offenders in the city: In 2011-12 some 808 children were "referred" to Scotland's Children's Hearing System, most of them for offending once or twice. That figure was down from 2918 in 2006-2007. The drop was 72%.

But it is not just the number of children who offend that is falling. The amount of offending they do is also down, by 38% since 2007-2008.

The number of serious violent crimes carried out by young people subject to the Children's Hearing System – all under-16s and some 16 and 17-year-olds - declined by 49% in the period.

And, as we revealed in Crime On Your Streets last week, the number of youngsters aged under 16 caught with a knife in the whole of the Strathclyde Police force area has dropped 75% in six years.

Why? Because of a concerted six-year effort to target young people who are violent, lock up the most dangerous ones, and wean the rest from gang fighting.

John Carnochan, the Strathclyde Police detective chief superintendent who leads the Scotland-wide Violence Reduction Unit, believes police have started looking at trouble the way doctors look at health.

Their first job? To stabilise the patient – and the patient was knife-carrying youngsters in west Scotland.

Now he and his colleagues believe schemes such as the much-praised Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV, a multi-agency initiative designed to reduce gang violence across Glasgow) have lured hundreds of heavy-duty gang fighters off the streets of the East End. It means Glasgow is close to a "tipping point".

Violent crime – still way too high despite dramatic reductions in recent years – could be about to drop even further.

Mr Carnochan said: "We noticed in CIRV that it was not just the guys we were involved with, the 400 or so, who were being less violent. Violent men by other men in the area was also down.

"Why? Because there were fewer people to fight with.

"I know this is an oversimplification, but if you have 10 guys in the street who want to have a gang fight then they need to find another 10 guys on the other side to do the same thing. And if they can't find them, there won't be a fight."

Figures suggest violence and knife-carrying among young people are falling far faster than among those who are older. Mr Carnochan and his colleagues are determined not to stop the focus on youngsters – but they recognise they are going to have make progress elsewhere too, such as domestic violence and the stereotypical fatal stabbing after a house party.

Police are quick to say they are part of a team curing Glasgow's youth of its violence and other offending. They know the problem is far from fixed.

Others are taking notice. When the cities of English erupted with rioting and looting last year, Glasgow gangs, always more interested in fighting than stealing, stayed quiet. Suddenly eyes in London turned north and Prime Minister David Cameron praised the CIRV project.

The picture was completely different just a decade ago. Then, social workers and senior officers privately admit, Scotland was in a state of "moral panic".

Gang culture – and knife carrying – was booming in the west. In 2006, according to an analysis of police data by the Evening Times, Glasgow had more than 2000 gang fighters. Most were in their mid-teens.

The then Labour-led Scottish Executive announced a "War On Neds" and police took to reporting an ever growing number of youngsters to the Children's Reporter system. But social workers said there were too many for the system to cope with.

New detention centres for youngsters were built.

Mr McKendrick and Glasgow social workers didn't like the word "Neds" and didn't altogether approve of the get-tough rhetoric and policy of custody.

But they now acknowledge the extra focus on youth offending helped concentrate their minds.

And when the War On Neds was dropped by the new SNP administration in 2007 Mr McKendrick's team quickly moved to find ways of getting youngsters out of crime, mostly without locking them up.

Mr McKendrick said: "There are people we need to protect the public from and they are the people we should be sending to custody.

"But we have to realise that what people lose in going to custody are the very things that in the longer term help them to stop offending.

"Things like good relationships. Things like employability. Things like having a structure to your days. Things like intensive support around addiction."

Mr McKendrick now talks of a "Glasgow way", a combination of tough action or in-your-face "intensive intervention" for those who cause the most trouble and comprehensive youth services for those merely at risk of getting into bother.

Police and Children's Reporter figures are not the only measures of how Glasgow youth are behaving.

There are also the calls made by the public to complain about "youths". Back in 2006-2007, there were more than 30,000 - that was 80 a day. In 2011-12, there were 7000, about 20 a day, another drop of three-quarters.

Calls to complain specifically about youth disturbances, which would include gang fights, fell from nearly 7500 back in 2006-2007 to about 1200 in 2011-12.

david.leask@eveningtimes.co.uk

James Callaghan can't stand the word 'neds'. He works for Glasgow Community Safety Services, in the early and effective intervention system that flags up every child who has committed an offence.

It is his job, with the help of a variety of professionals, to figure out what to do to stop their troublemaking, however minor, from escalating.

But he believes the last thing they need is a label.

"There was a culture of calling every young person a ned," he says.

"This is so stereotypical it is unbelievable. We can't label everybody a ned just because of the behaviour of a minority."