FOI 301291

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 301291

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 2^nd January 2024. Please find below the response to your request:

I’m looking into the numbers of crimes involving large blades, specifically machetes, swords and zombie knives

Please can you tell me the following:

Q1:  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").

Q2: 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?

Q3: 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?

Q4: 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.

Q5: 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.

Q6: 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.

Reply

West Mercia Police do not hold the information specifically in the way you have requested.

There is no specific offence title or keyword/marker relating to the bladed articles specified within the initial request, therefore a keyword search of the investigation summaries have been used to provide the below information.  As the word Zombie (less so in the case of machete or sword) could be used in a number of circumstances e.g. to describe a person or the name of a bike, each incident summary from the search has been looked at and those not relating to knife crime have been discounted.

Some incident summaries may include two or more of the keywords and therefore would appear in the results for multiple searches.  I have calculated how many crimes have been duplicated in in case it is relevant.

There may be occasions where the circumstances of an incident require more than one crime report to be generated for example if two suspects punch someone and when they are arrested one is found in possession of drugs and the other a bladed article.  The incident summary for these multiple offences maybe the same, despite them having different crime references and therefore would each be included in the results.  The manner in which the incidents are recorded (having different suspects or victims linked, be linked at different locations or have slightly different times) means we are unable to identify these reports.

The information West Mercia Police is able to provide is outlined below: