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August 22, 2024 - 3:15pm
Britain has seen a number of high-profile stabbings in recent weeks, the most notable being the mass stabbing of children in Southport at the end of last month. Such incidents have given rise to the claim that we’re in the midst of a “knife crime epidemic”. Indeed, many posts making this claim have gone viral on X. But what does the data say?
One widely-circulated post refers to the “4th stabbing in the span of two weeks”. Another refers to “8 stabbings reported across the UK in 36 hours”. Yet another claims that stabbings “are a daily thing now”. While these claims sound alarming, Britain is a big country, so you’d expect a certain number of stabbings each week. The question is: has the number of stabbings in recent weeks been unusually large?
Official data isn’t yet available (it is always reported with a lag), so let’s take the most alarming of the claims mentioned above: “8 stabbings reported across the UK in 36 hours”. This corresponds to 5.3 in 24 hours, but we’ll round up to six. Is six stabbings in a single day unusual?
There are two key measures of the number of stabbings in Britain: the number of offences involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by police, and the number of hospital admissions for assault with sharp objects. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
One disadvantage of police-recorded stabbings is that not every victim decides to inform the authorities. Another is that the figures do not distinguish actual stabbings from attempted stabbings. In the latest year for which data is available (the year ending March 2024), the police recorded 233 homicides involving a knife or sharp instrument, 401 attempted murders, and 22,167 cases of “assault with injury” or “assault with intent to cause serious harm”. But we aren’t told how many assaults were “with injury” versus “with intent”. Adding together the three figures equals 22,801, which provides an upper bound for the total number of stabbings.
A disadvantage of the hospital admissions measure is that it refers to patient episodes, rather than patients (an individual patient can be admitted to hospital more than once for the same injury). Another is that it excludes patients who turned up at A&E but were not subsequently admitted to hospital. In the year ending March 2024, there were 3,888 hospital admissions for assault with sharp objects. Although this figure double-counts some patients, it excludes others, and is substantially lower than the number of police-recorded stabbings. Hence the true number of stabbings is unlikely to be lower than 3,888.
To be conservative, let’s use this figure as our benchmark. Dividing by 365, to give a daily total, equals 10.7. Which means that in a typical day, we should expect 10–11 stabbings. Six in a single day is therefore not unusual.
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SubscribeIt would be interesting to know the ethnic group breakdown and also the ages of those involved (victims and perpetrators- if indeed these can be distinguished) with these stabbings. Possibly this might assist in targeting those most at risk. Oh hang on! That might resemble stop ad search which despite its reported effectiveness offends certain sensibilities.
Yes, stop and search is very effective. It is pro-active rather than reactive; pro-active things always give the police a bad name and reactive things, by their nature, are too late to be useful.
Also, even suggesting there might be an ethnic dimension in the UK today can seemingly get you arrested.
They don’t like to mention it, but a grossly disproportionate number of stabbings are Somalis stabbing other Somalis (you might find some people saying blacks stabbing blacks, but this is imprecise and does lead to a slur on all black people, when more precision would be helpful to everyone).
This particular perceived uptick is purely a reporting phenomena, because of the Southport stabbings. However the reality is it has been a problem for years which is getting worse, albeit more slowly than people think – when you start with a small number then it is easy to get large % rises, which sound shocking. But when you have been ineffective for years if not decades (afraid to take the most effective measure to stop it because you are concerned about being called racist) then you already have large numbers, so increases appear as smaller % rises. We don’t have a sudden knife crime epidemic, it is endemic.
The question is, as a society should we care more about people being stabbed or people being offended by what people say both on and off line? Personally I would much rather we focused all available resources on real world criminal actions, particularly the most serious like rape and stabbings, rather than on thought / speech crime. Those resources need to be proportionately targeted towards the demographic groupings that commit them – anything else is just an inefficient waste of resources.
What’s the phrase? something like “Without fear or favour”. Starmer and others trying to claim on one hand that that is what we get and on the other unsustainably weaponizing the whole Criminal Justice system against a very specific part of the population whilst refusing to even accept the possibility that they may have legitimate grievances, which some have expressed inappropriately, just heightens those grievances whilst further eroding what little faith we have left in our institutions.
I take the point that averages are open to manipulation and are used to make political points but..whether the average number of stabbings per day is 5 or 6 is not that important. Also there is more reporting on an increasing number of news channels which means that stabbings news is always in our faces. But there are just too many stabbings!! Stop and search by the police is the only real way to keep these numbers down.
Being pickier as to whom you import into one’s country might be a even more effective method to lower the numbers.
You’ll have Plod (recently rebranded as Keir Jong-Un’s Morality Police) feeling your collar if you come out with any more truths like that.
How do we define epidemic? In comparison to what timeframe? Would be interesting to see a decade by decade break down for last 50 years
How do we define epidemic?
We don’t. The WHO tell us!
I’d guess that our national stabbing average was more moderate in the 50s, (but probably worse during the Elizabethan period)
Good point. The corrective in this article isn’t worth much as its average is based on the previous year. As said elsewhere in the comments, when adults are talking about the escalation of knife crime, they’re comparing to many years ago.
That’s great reasoning. “As long as the overall number of stabbings is increasing gradually it’s not a problem. Sure we’re at 100 stabbings a day now, but if you look at the recent data that’s only a 5% increase over last year so it’s nothing to worry about.”
Honestly I can see the Monty Python sketch now “well im sorry sir but as you know the governmentally approved number of stabbings each month is 300 and unfortunately we’re quite behind with only 275 stabbings, so we’re going to have to stab a couple of you to meet quota. What of course we have to meet the quota! iI we didn’t meet our stabbing quota then we’d be allowed to have fewer stabbings next month, which would be unsustainable, I mean clearly we can’t stop all knife crime in a country so large. So instead we just try to keep it manageable by keeping it within the quota, but if the quota was brought to low then we would have too many stabbings and people would start to question the effectiveness of the police and would be less supportive because they wouldn’t think we could do our jobs, and then there could be a breakdown of social order people it could be the end of Britain as we know it. So really by being stabbed your being a patriot for your country to ensure people still believe the police can do their jobs. So whose first then?”
Incidentally with 10 stabbings allowed a day that’s 3650 Britons stabbed a year for whatever that is worth.
Would be useful to look at the data over a 20- 30+ year period – as that is what a lot of adults will be using as a benchmark when they talk about things getting worse (or thinking that they are getting worse).
This neatly highlights that the vast majority of people do not understand probability and risk, and that includes many of the highly educated, including the legal profession, medical staff, politicians and civil servants. It is a serious problem when this leads to miscarriages of justice, faulty health programmes and harmful political policies and guidelines.
The author misses the point. It isn’t the number overall it is who is getting stabbed. I don’t suppose many people care how many gang members are doing it to rival gangs but it is when the victims are innocents, small children or not gang members that it really raises heckles. This is what the journalist should spend his time looking into. Admittedly it might be a lot of work but that is a journalist’s lot.
Are your ‘heckles’ getting raised by the number of children being killed or mutilated by drivers who have had a glass of wine but are not over the limit? Drivers who have impaired their reactions by choice and then operate a killing machine. I thought not. Yet far more children are harmed this way than by the ‘epidemic’ of knife crime. But of course, these slightly tipsy murder-drivers are white and middle class- good sorts. Nothing like awful, stabbie darkies.
Err, yes I am indeed worried about that – bang them up if they are caught even if they haven’t killed anyone. Why would you assume that I wouldn’t care about this?
I think that 10 stabbings per day seems reasonable
Unless you are the one being’stabbed’!
Hopefully you’re being sarcastic !
Media and statistics have never been good bedfellows.
Does anyone else get the feeling that there is a lot of hand waving and statistics being used to convince everyone that things are now better under Starmer than it was with more rightist governance?
It reminds of when the Soviets would focus efforts on showcasing a few areas they were doing well in such as ice cream production, while meanwhile everything else was going disastrously wrong.
But hey maybe I am just an ignoramus that doesn’t understand all the complexity of the numbers and the reality of things because I keep insisting on what my lying eyes are telling me.
A crime has a time and a location. Where are the stabbings taking place and at what time? What are the sexes, age, ethnic( racial ) and religious backgrounds of criminal and victim? What are the rates of being a criminal and a victims per capita ? How does this compare each decade back to 1934 , during The Depression. If these questions are not answered ,the information is incomplete because the authorities wish to hide certain facts.
I would expect that 50 years ago or more, knife attacks were usually located in docks.
A few years ago a statistician said the publics’ lack of understanding of statistics is so poor that it is a threat to democracy as so many political decisions are based upon statistics.
I think the issue for most is not rival gang stabbings but the random, irrational and/or terror-related isolated stabbings of strangers and children in particular by foreign-born or 2nd generation immigrants. That is different over the last 15 yrs. And horrifyingly. It is this knife-crime that we’ve seemingly seen an uptick in. Nobody is grappling with that. Just told to shut up and not be racist. The author seems to be on a mission to ‘defuse tensions’ rather than investigate the causes of this phenomenon. This being similar to an article in the Daily Skeptic about a related issue. We can’t wait for statistical certainty, It’s too lethal. There’s been a qualitative change. ‘Seen a black swan’ etc etc.
I’d suggest all criminals be asked to carry knives, and all others asked to carry guns. Between a knife and a gun, aggressors always prefer knives: silent, foolproof, easy to conceal and use, easy to explain if stopped. Victims prefer guns: they can scare off an attacker without getting within range of a knife, even if they malfunction.
I hope this comment isn’t illegal now. If so, I withdraw it.
Too late, some of your finest will be along shortly to sort you out. Better pack an overnight bag…
“knife crime”. A ridiculous euphemism. Just call it what it is. Stabbing. Violence with intent to kill.
10 stabbings a day amongst a population of 67 million is absolutely nothing. Compare this to the 900 road traffic accidents that occur each day with, shock horror, actual children and ‘babes in arms’ being mutilated and killed by out of control wheeled killing machines. Yet no one riots over our addiction to getting from A to B quickly.
So why do a few stabbings make us so collectively angry? It is because of emotions and optics. We feel the stabbing has been done on purpose. That it could have been avoided. We are stuck in a social media fuelled cult of ‘oppressor and oppressed’ and any negative events that fit this metric get far more attention then they deserve. The pushing of the point of a blade seems so fraught with intent that we forget that violence erupts naturally in all societies with far less reason than we want to ascribe. Would it be nice to have No stabbings at all? Of course. But consider the probabilities for a moment. You are as likely to get stabbed in the UK on any single day as you are to win the jackpot in the national lottery by buying two £1 tickets. We need to separate emotions from probabilities.
Next time you feel scared don’t get in your car. Instead take the train and go for a bungee jump. It’s safer.
The perpetrator of the Southport stabbings was from a Rwandan, probably Tutsi, family. Tutsis must have misstepped to make escape to UK a better option. Why is this not being investigated?