Knife crime in schools

Freedom of information request reference no: 191/25

REQUEST

REQUEST 1: How many calls did the force respond to during 2024, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

REQUEST 2: How many calls did the force respond to during 2023, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

REQUEST 3: How many calls did the force respond to during 2022, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

REQUEST 4: How many calls did the force respond to during 2021, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

REQUEST 5: How many calls did the force respond to during 2020, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

REQUEST 6: How many calls did the force respond to during 2019, involving the possession of a knife or bladed article in the force area's schools?

Clarification

South Wales Police: Please could you kindly confirm that where you ask for the number of calls that the force responded to, do you mean crimes?

Applicant: I was, in general terms, keen to see how many times the force had been called to a school after a knife had been found in a person's possession.

However, I appreciate that data is very broad and may not be logged.

In which case, if there is data on the number of crimes involving a knife/bladed article at schools, that would work instead.

RESPONSE

Knife crime is a priority within South Wales Police and is managed through a dedicated Temporary Chief Superintendent with strategic responsibility for serious violence. Our work in this area is prevention focussed; however, the work of our dedicated Operation Sceptre Teams ensures we are proactive in targeting and bringing to justice those intent on carrying knifes.  

We have consulted with our analysts who advise that in order to ascertain the accurate number of times officers attended a school, we would be required to individually interrogate each occurrence on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS). This would exceed the appropriate fees limit of 18 hours under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Therefore, as you have already confirmed you’re happy to receive crime figures, the following information has been provided.

A search has been conducted for all crimes recorded under the following Home Office (HO) offence codes where ‘Preparatory/First/Primary/Infant/Junior/Middle School’ and ‘Secondary/High School’ have been selected under the tertiary address between 1^st January 2019 and 31^st December 2024.

HO Codes:

8/27: Having an article with a blade or point on school/further education premises

8/62: Threaten with a blade or sharply pointed article on school/further education premises

Please see the below table that provides the number of crimes recorded under the above HO codes broken down by calendar year:

Please be advised, this search has been conducted under the crime date and not by the reported date. This means that any results brought back will relate to occurrences that were recorded as a crime between 1^st January 2019 and 31^st December 2024 and not when the occurrences were first reported. Therefore, results retrieved may contain incidents that were reported before 1^st January 2019.

The results retrieved are dependent on how the information has been entered onto the system. As such, the information provided should not be considered statistically accurate and/or definitive and therefore care should be taken when using this data for any further statistical, analytical or evaluative purposes.