knife crime and stop and search data by gender and race 2015-2024

Response

In our previous response 1446-24, we provided the following data on knife crime: 

1. A count of arrests where there is a Home Office (HO) knife flag attached to the individual’s custody record, for the Bristol area from 2015 – 2023.   As explained in that response, 2015 is not a full year for home office knife flagging so the data for that year was low by comparison with other, complete years. Arrest data was recorded per individual in custody.  

1. A count of crimes of ‘Offence of Possession of Weapons’ filtered to Possession of Blade from 2008-19 December 2024 annual totals. Data from 2008-2015 was from Guardian, our crime recording system before Niche. We explained that this data may not be accurate given retention policies and changes in how data was recorded. This was for offence count and may include multiple individuals within one occurrence/offence count record.    

Within the attached disclosure document, both datasets relating to knife crime have been reproduced and then broken down into age, race and gender as requested.  The first four tables show this for point 1; the following four tables show this for point 2.   

With regards to the Home Office (HO) knife flag table, you will notice in our initial response the figure for 2023 was 469. This has now been revised to 488. This is because the data comes from a live database and amendments to this, such as reclassification or new information added that identifies a knife flagged offence, will amend numbers returned. Each time a new query is run such as providing data broken down by age, race and gender, any amendments to data such as those described will return an amended figure.  

You will notice there are differences in totals for ‘Offence of Possession of Weapons’ when comparing the 1446-24 data with the data broken down by age, race and gender. This is because multiple individuals can be recorded under one occurrence/offence count so when individual characteristics are broken down within each occurrence/offence count, total numbers can then vary. 

For stop and search data provided in response to 1446-24, on this occasion we will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the appropriate cost limit. This is because to break the information provided from our QlikApp down further into age, race and gender for the time period requested would require manual intervention to create, combine, extract and cross-reference the data. 

Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate cost limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it. 

This serves as a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the FOI Act. 

As part of our section 16 obligation to assist you, we publish information on stop and search statistics from April 2017 here, and stop and search data for all police forces is available here from December 2021 until November 2024. 

The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.