Data plea in fight against Staffordshire knife crime

Matthew Ellis, the Staffordshire Commissioner for Police, Fire and Rescue and Crime, has written to health service bosses asking for statistical information from them about injuries likely to have been caused by a knife, but not reported to the police.

It comes after a teenager was rushed to hospital after being struck with a bladed article, thought to be a machete, close to The Four Crosses pub in Stafford.

Mr Ellis said: "Tackling the scourge of knife crime and other serious violence has to be a priority for policing.

"While in most of Staffordshire the scale of knife crime is nowhere near that of many other places, it only takes one moment of madness to result in tragedy.

"But policing cannot do this purely by enforcement and they cannot do this on their own."

He added: "Key to understanding more about the scale and circumstances of knife crime is good intelligence, but also good statistics and data.

"Health services, particularly A&E, have high level data which does not identify individual details of assaults but provides geographic information which helps understanding."