FOI 697/26

Request

Please provide the following data regarding recorded crimes and weapon seizures within your force's jurisdiction over the past five calendar years, plus the current year to date (from January 1, 2021, to May 31, 2026).

To ensure this request remains within the appropriate cost limit, please apply a two-stage filtering process to your search:

1. Stage 1 (Cohort): Identify all recorded offences or incidents that feature a "bladed article", "sharp instrument", or "knife crime" marker, OR fall under Home Office offence codes for possession of an offensive weapon.
2. Stage 2 (Keyword Search): Within that specific cohort, search the Modus Operandi (MO) text, summary, or free-text notes fields for any of the following keywords:

• "kirpan"
• "ceremonial dagger"
• "ceremonial knife"
• "religious exemption"
• "religious article"

Response

We have consulted with our analysts who have provided the following information in relation to your request.

Question 1

Please see the document entitled ‘Response data 697_26’ which contains a breakdown of offences by ‘Knife Crime ADR’, ‘Possession Offences 10C/10D’ and a mix of both.

Please note we don’t have any specific breakdowns of "bladed article", "sharp instrument", or "knife crime” under the ‘Knife Crime ADR’ flag that is used but the inclusion of offence types may help supplement this.

ADR refers to Annual Data Requirement, which is a list of all requests for data made to all police forces in England and Wales under the Home Secretary’s statutory powers. A wide range of data is collected, including crime, police workforce, arrests and stop and search, however the information has been limited to South Wales Police for this query.

Question 2

A keyword search has been conducted on the occurrence summary and Modus Operandi (MO) fields of each occurrence identified in question 1 containing one of the following key words, “kirpan”, “ceremonial dagger”, “ceremonial knife”, “religious exemption”, and “religious article”.

This search has retrieved no results.

Please note that this data has been queried by searching through the question 1 data with the above keywords in the relevant time period. 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.

Keyword searches are notoriously unreliable, the reasons why searches using this method are not reliable include (but are not limited to) the following: – 

1. a) Searches rely on the keywords being spelt correctly with no grammatical errors 
2. b) Searches rely on the keywords actually being mentioned in the MO or the summary description of the record – if they are mentioned anywhere else within the record but not in the MO or summary, then they will not feature in any results.