The New South Wales government was adamant that swift, decisive action was needed to combat a spate of knife crime across Sydney. A series of high-profile stabbings and media reports about “knife attack hotspots” had created a sense of urgency to do something about it.
“Too many people, almost exclusively young men, think that it is OK to carry a knife,” the NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, told parliament on 20 June.
“In the same way as we would pick up a pen and put it into our pocket when we go to work, there are young men who think that it is OK to put a knife into their pocket to carry out their daily business.”
Yet some experts were confused when the new state Labor government last month announced the doubling of the maximum penalties for people caught with knives in public or in schools.
There have been prominent cases of serious crimes involving knives, such as the stabbing death of paramedic Steven Tougher in April and an attack on a Service NSW worker the following month. There is also the death of Uati “Pele” Faletolu, who was 17 when he died at last year’s Royal Easter Show.
But the statistics say they are the exceptions to the trends.
In fact, they suggest assaults and robberies involving knives are actually at their lowest levels in 20 years.
Jackie Fitzgerald, the executive director of the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar), said the data is “clear” and shows the use of knives in crime is at a historic low.
“The most recent year shows very low rates of offences with knives,” she said.
But “the question about where [it is that] more people are carrying knives is more difficult to answer”, according to Fitzgerald, who said policing priorities would have an effect on figures.
“We’re dependent on the police detecting these incidents and usually that’s through some kind of productivity … so if police are focused on weapons offences, they will detect more weapons being carried,” she said.
She noted that knife custody in a public place was at a high, but that was “not dissimilar to where we were in 2020, 2021 and even similar to the year before that”.
“There’s no indication that there’s been a sharp rise in people carrying knives,” she said.
She said the figures around wielding a knife in public also remained stable over recent years and just two people have been prosecuted for wielding a knife in a school over the past decade.
There were between 13 and 24 offences each year between 2019 and 2023 of wielding of a knife in public over the 10 years.
Three people have been prosecuted for visibly carrying a knife in a school over the same period.
The prosecution numbers do not show how many youth offenders have been diverted from court.
The figures for some offences were so low that they presented an opportunity for police to better understand why they occur, in order to try to prevent them from happening again, according to the NSW Greens’ justice spokesperson, Sue Higginson.
“Taking this kind of sharper, bigger stick approach is not going to change these figures,” she said.
“We’re just going to keep criminalising and then imposing harsher measures on people who are already vulnerable and locked in the criminal justice system. This just perpetuates a dysfunctional cycle and it’s not going to make anyone safer.”
She accused the government of taking a “populist” approach to policy, rather than working in the best interest of people, especially the state’s youth.
A spokesperson for the NSW police minister, Yasmin Catley, said the government will “make no apologies for taking strong action against those caught carrying knives illegally in public”.
“Knife attacks regularly cause horrific injuries and deaths and there is absolutely no place for this kind of dangerous behaviour in our community,” they said.
But the NSW advocate for children and young people, Zoë Robinson, said the law change was not supported by the data and the government needed to be thinking about the impact of jail time on young people.
“We encourage a focus on early intervention and holistic support when talking about how to respond to these complex issues,” she said.
“The data doesn’t support this legislative response. We should be working collectively together to support and work with young people, not impose punitive responses.”
A spokesperson for Daley, the attorney general, said the tougher penalties “are intended to send a strong message about the seriousness of knife-related crime” and youth offenders will still be eligible to receive a caution or referral to youth justice conferencing where appropriate.
