Bladed-weapon call-outs to police unit nearly eightfold

Call-outs involving bladed weapons to the police special unit rose nearly eightfold between 2013 and 2024, with increased knife carrying accounting for most of the increase, the Office of the National Commissioner of Police told mbl.is.

The number of special-unit call-outs in which a weapon was present rose from 56 in 2014 to 424 last year. There have been 231 such call-outs so far this year.

The police commissioner’s office said the increase was not simply because the special unit was responding to more incidents overall. Weapons were present in about one-third of its call-outs from 2013 to 2016, compared with 60 to 68 per cent from 2022 onwards.

Bladed weapons, particularly knives, were the most common. They were present in 301 of the 424 armed call-outs last year, or 71 per cent. Since 2023, bladed weapons have featured in more than 70 per cent of such call-outs, compared with 57 to 69 per cent between 2013 and 2022.

Call-outs involving bladed weapons increased from 38 in 2013 to 363 in 2024. The office said the rise in armed call-outs was largely driven by knife carrying.

The office said more reports of armed individuals were behind the trend, but that the increase could not be attributed solely to more people carrying weapons. Greater public and police awareness of the dangers, as well as a lower threshold for reporting weapons, may also have played a part.

Between 2016 and 2017, call-outs rose by 175 per cent and reports of armed individuals by 109 per cent. The office said the speed of that change suggested there had been a genuine increase.

Separately, incidents in which regular police officers used weapons, excluding security duties, rose from 28 in 2016 to between 121 and 157 a year over the past three years. Conducted-energy weapons were issued to police forces in the first week of September 2024. By autumn 2025, 577 officers had been trained to use them.

The weapons had been drawn or used to threaten someone 130 times, and deployed 16 times, according to a report by the commissioner’s office. The office said it was too early to assess their effect on armed call-outs, though there were signs that the rise had slowed after their introduction.