Glasgow city centre grapples with drugs, violence and rising racial tensions

On the streets around Glasgow's Central Station, where tourists first arrive to discover Scotland's biggest city, something has fractured. Videos circulate constantly on social media—brutal beatings, open drug transactions, racial violence—and the claims have hardened into a narrative: parts of the city centre have become unsafe, places where ordinary people, especially women, should not venture alone. The BBC spent a week in June filming to see what was actually happening.

What the cameras captured was a landscape of visible disorder. Drug dealers worked openly, sometimes concealing wraps in their mouths before handing them to buyers. There were thefts, arrests, and street brawls—one involving young men hurling traffic cones at a man with a dog. A taxi driver who works the area regularly described it as sometimes feeling like the "zombie apocalypse," with so many people visibly intoxicated. A convenience store manager on Union Street reported being racially abused at least twenty times daily, his shop under constant assault from addicts. All of this unfolded steps from one of Glasgow's most recognizable landmarks.

The scale of the problem is documented in police data. Last year, more than four hundred violent assaults were recorded on the main streets and squares within the dispersal zone—an area around St Enoch Square and the Four Corners where police were given special powers in March to temporarily ban individuals. Over fifteen hundred dispersal notices have been issued since then, yet the problems persist. On Union Street alone, police have recorded nearly twenty-eight hundred crimes since 2023. The store manager, Faisal Umar, told the BBC that dealers operate with impunity partly because they use underage children to move drugs, knowing young people rarely face serious consequences. A police constable confirmed the pattern: dealers carry small amounts, conceal drugs in their mouths, and accept the risk of swallowing if caught. "It's a routine of every day," Umar said. "We call the police and they come and say: 'What can we do?'"

But the crisis has become entangled with something darker. Kip Lawson was beaten so badly his lip tore open and he lost part of a front tooth—attacked by a group of drunk white men. Four months later, he was assaulted again, this time by a black man who robbed him. "I can't even walk through my gorgeous town without feeling like something bad is going to happen," he said. In three months of filming, six serious sexual assaults were reported in the city centre. An 11 percent increase in reported rapes, attempted rapes, and sexual assaults has occurred across Glasgow over five years. Where ethnicity was recorded in rape cases, eighty-nine suspects were white and twenty-four were Asian, African, or from another ethnic group. Yet anti-immigration influencers have seized on these crimes, speculating publicly about attackers' ethnicities when police do not release them, fueling a narrative that links criminality to immigration.

Into this space has stepped Scots Active, a vigilante group led by Darren Docherty. Members patrol the streets in balaclavas, claiming to protect women and girls from sexual predators and to expose drug dealers. Critics describe them as racist and far-right extremists. Docherty denies being racist but confirms his group "often clash with young black and Asian drug dealers." He frames the problem as cultural incompatibility: "It's nothing other than two cultures do not align, and that's what's causing a lot of friction." Members have joined violent anti-immigration demonstrations. On one day during filming, a masked mob of hundreds rampaged through the city in response to a knife attack in Belfast allegedly committed by a Sudanese man. Four days later, dozens of far-right protesters, some performing Nazi-style salutes, clashed with police while thousands of anti-racism campaigners marched along Buchanan Street with banners reading "refugees welcome" and "hate has no place here."

Police Scotland's Chief Inspector Stephen McManus acknowledged that racial tensions have become a larger part of policing. "Glasgow is a multicultural and diverse city, and there is usually a high level of tolerance," he said. "There is undoubtedly a level of intolerance creeping in which has become included in protest." He warned that misinformation circulating on social media fuels community divisions and can trigger the very protests the city has witnessed. A woman named Zoe, who was sexually harassed on a bus, challenged the narrative being weaponized by vigilante groups. "They say it's about protecting women and children, but it's not," she said. "It's about being racist, causing public disorder, and being aggressive and violent."

The underlying causes—addiction, homelessness, the absence of support for asylum seekers once they receive refugee status—remain largely unaddressed. Glasgow has accepted more asylum seekers than anywhere else in the UK through a Home Office scheme, but once granted status, government support ends and many end up in temporary housing or on the streets. On the BBC's final day of filming, a drug user unfolded a dispersal notice barring him from the zone for twenty-four hours and used the letter to help split up crack cocaine. The taxi driver noted that dispersal orders simply move the problem elsewhere, to streets like Sauchiehall Street. Police say they deploy officers based on crime data and run dedicated weekend patrols. The council committed to expanding CCTV monitoring. But the fracture remains: a city where crime, homelessness, and drug addiction have become entangled with racial resentment, where the most vulnerable—addicts, asylum seekers, women—are caught between criminal predation and vigilante anger, and where the actual work of addressing why people are on the streets in the first place has barely begun.