You asked
I would like to request data pertaining to crimes involving the use of a knife for the time frame 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2010 in the Greater London Area.
We said
Thank you for your email requesting data on crimes involving use of a knife in the Greater London Area from 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2010. Unfortunately, data on offences involving a knife or sharp instrument only began to be collected in April 2009, and comparable data are not available before the year ending March 2011.
Data from police recorded knife or sharp instrument offences data are submitted to the Home Office via an additional special collection. This special collection includes the offences: homicide; attempted murder; threats to kill; assault with injury and assault with intent to cause serious harm; robbery; rape; and sexual assault.
The Home Office publish a series of open data tables on police recorded crimes broken down by police force area, financial year and quarter, and an equivalent open data table is available for crimes involving a knife or sharp instrument since 2009. This dataset includes some incidents where a knife may not have been used as a weapon. You can use these open data tables to select offences recorded in London.
If you have any questions regarding this data source, and any data available for the time period you are interested in, you can contact the Home Office. They can be reached at: CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk
If you have any other crime related queries in future, you can email CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help.