FOI T005/24 - Knife Crime

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

Thank you for your email received on the 2 January 2024 in which you made a request for access to certain information which may be held by Northumbria Police.

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and we provide a response for your attention.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. We can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

We are able to disclose the located information to you as follows, however all the below should be noted when viewing the figures.

• The data has been taken from systems where one of the following keywords was found in the MO text, 'Machete', 'Machette', 'Sword', 'Zombie knife', 'Zombie sword'.
• As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the Crime MO. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Also, we cannot search the crime investigation screens/additional information screens, if the terms are not used within the MO the crime will not be identified.  The MO search is limited to the first 242 characters of the MO, any information beyond that will not be searched.
• As these keywords were searched for individually, where more than one of the keywords appears in the MO text, that offence will be reported on more than one occasion, 1,604 occurrences have been reported in total however there were only 1,580 crimes.
• This FOI has been answered based on the instructions in this submission, which omits a search of the weapons/instrument attached to the crime.  The weapon as described may have been recorded but may not have been written into the MO text, therefore this offence will not appear in the data supplied.

You asked:

1. For the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 how many crimes were logged by your force where a machete was recorded as being an element in the offence? (Note: I would hope that this could be achieved by a computer search on the MO of crimes for the words "machete" or variants of the spelling to include "machette" and "machetes").

2. For the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 how many crimes were logged by your force where a sword was recorded as being an element in the offence?

3. For the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 how many crimes were logged by your force where a zombie knife or zombie sword was recorded as being an element in the offence?

4. Please provide me with a table showing a breakdown of the crimes from Question 1 that are ‘linked’ to machete/s by its mention in the MO for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 by offence subgroup as per the Home Office counting rules.

5. Please provide me with a table showing a breakdown of the crimes from Question 2 that are ‘linked’ to sword/s by its mention in the MO for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 by offence subgroup as per the Home Office counting rules.

6. Please provide me with a table showing a breakdown of the crimes from Question 3 that are ‘linked’ to zombie knife/knives by its mention in the MO for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 by offence subgroup as per the Home Office counting rules.