Knife crime in London

You asked

Please could you provide data indicating the percentages of crime in London that involved a knife as a weapon from January 2010 to the present?

We said

Thank you for your email requesting data on the percentages of crime in London that involved a knife as a weapon. 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. Data on offences involving a knife or sharp instrument began to be collected in April 2009; however, comparable data are only available from the year ending March 2011.

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. 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, and calculate the percentage of all crimes recorded in the region that involved a knife or sharp instrument.

Table 1 outlines the percentage of all crimes (excluding fraud) recorded in London that involved a knife or sharp instrument, from the year ending March 2011 to the year ending March 2018.