"Figure 3: Continued rise in offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, but a decrease in offences involving firearms ","" "England and Wales, year ending March 2003 to year ending June 2018","" "","" "Notes","1. Police recorded crime data are not designated as National Statistics. 2. Police recorded knife or sharp instrument offences data are submitted 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. 3. Police recorded crime statistics for offences involving a knife or sharp instrument based on data from 43 police forces in England and Wales. Data from Greater Manchester Police are excluded. A review of Greater Manchester Police data has identified undercounting of crimes involving a knife or sharp instrument. This occurred due to a technical issue with the identification and extraction of all relevant records of these offences from their crime recording system. GMP have changed the methodology they use to extract knife or sharp instrument offences and data from December 2017 onwards have been revised. However, data for earlier periods have not been revised and are likely to exclude relevant crimes that were recorded in GMP. Due to these changes, data for GMP have been excluded from the time series. 4. 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 [Offences involving the use of weapons: data tables](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/offencesinvolvingtheuseofweaponsdatatables) includes data on offences involving a knife or sharp instrument going back to the year ending March 2009. 5. Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire Police forces have implemented new crime recording systems for offences involving the use of a knife or sharp instrument, therefore data for the latest year may be under-recorded. It is expected that this will be revised in future publications. 6. Firearms include: shotguns; handguns; rifles; imitation weapons such as BB guns or soft air weapons; other weapons such as CS gas, pepper spray and stun guns; and unidentified weapons. They exclude conventional air weapons, such as air rifles. 7. South Wales and Cambridgeshire Police have not supplied data on firearm offences for Quarter 1 2018 (April to June). Due to the relatively low number of these offences in these forces, this will not change the overall picture of offences involving firearms. 8. Data on firearms offences are provisional and have not been reconciled with police forces. " "Unit","Number of offences" "","" "","Knife or sharp instrument offences (exc Greater Manchester Police)","Firearm offences" "Mar 03","","10248" "Mar 04","","10338" "Mar 05","","11069" "Mar 06","","11088" "Mar 07","","9645" "Mar 08","","9865" "Mar 09","","8199" "Mar 10","","8082" "Mar 11","30620","7040" "Mar 12","29250","6022" "Mar 13","24798","5158" "Mar 14","23945","4856" "Mar 15","24304","4911" "Mar 16","27081","5182" "","","" "Jun 17","35134","6694" "Jun 18","39332","6362"