ONS stats back our call for sustained funding, says Fed chair

24 January 2020

Knife crime has risen by 17 per cent in the West Midlands, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday.

The latest ONS police-recorded crime figures for the year ending September 2019 show there were 3,649 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the Force area in the period between October 2018 and September 2019. That was up from 3,108 during the previous 12 months.

Jon Nott, West Midlands Federation chair, said the figures were ‘grim’ and underlined the need to recruit more officers to get Force numbers back to pre-2010 levels.

“These figures make grim reading,” he said, “A decade of cuts means that our members are stretched like never before and until we have the proper resources to properly police our communities then recorded crime figures will continue to rise.

“Policing needs more funding, the criminal justice system needs more funding and we need to ensure the most violent offenders are taken off our streets.”

The new statistics show that there were 262,188 recorded crimes in the West Midlands in the last year, a rise of seven per cent.

Violence against the person was up 27 per cent, robbery was up 13 per cent and drug offences were up 24 per cent.

Theft, meanwhile, was down seven per cent, burglary was down by six per cent and shoplifting dropped by 10 per cent.

Jon said: “Society has become a more violent place and the police cannot and should not be expected to fight this crime epidemic alone.

“We need more support from other areas of the public sector. This is not a simple problem to fix.”

Nationally, there has been a six per cent fall in homicide, there has been a record seven per cent rise in knife/sharp instrument offences and a 12 per cent rise in robbery.*

National Federation chair John Apter said: “The Government’s funding announcement for policing was a move in the right direction, but it goes nowhere near enough on undoing the damage from the past decade of cuts.

“We need long-term sustainable funding which must make a positive difference to policing. This is what policing needs, and what the public deserves.”

* The figures do not include data from Greater Manchester Police who were unable to provide an update due to IT problems.