About this data
- Selected offences are homicide, attempted murder, threats to kill, assault with injury or intent to cause serious harm, robbery, rape and sexual assault.
- Figures start in the year ending June 2009. Knife crime figures before April 2019 were collected in a different way and are not directly comparable with later years.
- The Metropolitan Police changed how it records knife crime in April 2024, which affects comparisons with earlier years.
- Years end in June: 2026 is July 2025 to June 2026. Rates use ONS mid-year population estimates for the local authorities in each area (mid-2025 for the year ending June 2026).
- Changes over time partly reflect how crimes are recorded. Recording improved substantially after 2014, which pushed up recorded violence and sexual offences in particular.
- Greater Manchester Police introduced a new IT system in July 2019, after which many crimes went unrecorded; its figures for the years ending June 2020 and 2021 are likely to be undercounts.
- Rates are per resident, so areas with large numbers of commuters, shoppers, tourists or night-time visitors — especially city centres — have higher rates than the risk to residents alone would suggest.
- Police recorded crime depends on how many crimes are reported and how each force records them, so differences between areas partly reflect recording practice. Fraud is excluded, as it is recorded nationally rather than by local forces.
This chart appears in Crime.