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Police in England and Wales have recorded a massive 14% rise in crime in the last year.

The leap to 5.3million cases to September 2017 was driven partly by a surge in knife and gun crime and a 36% jump in cases of stalking and harassment.

Police recorded 262,459 stalking and harassment cases, which are classed as violent crime, in the year to September.

Rapes recorded by police also soared by 29% to 48,773 in the last year.

And domestic burglaries were up 32% to more than 250,000 in a year, according to forces.

Labour said today's was the largest rise in police-recorded crime in recent history.

Overall officers recorded almost 1.3million cases of violent crime, up 20%.

(Image: PA)

Of these violent crimes almost half, 535,150, were "violence without injury" such as stalking.

Violence that caused injury rose 9% to 492,394 cases.

Non-domestic burglaries, murders and drug possession were down, but every single other measure of police-recorded crime rose.

Police-recorded crime is only one of two measures used by the government.

The other, the Crime Survey for England and Wales, said crime had actually fallen by 10%.

The Office for National Statistics prefers to use the Crime Survey, saying police-recorded statistics "must be interpreted with caution".

(Image: Rex)

But statisticians agreed a surge in knife and gun crime had fuelled a burden on hard-pressed police.

Forces registered 37,443 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the year ending September 2017 - a 21% increase compared with the previous year and the highest tally since comparable records started in the 12 months to March 2011.

Gun crime also went up by a fifth, to 6,694 recorded offences.

Mark Bangs of the ONS said: "While overall levels of violent crime were not increasing, there is evidence of rises having occurred in some of the low incidence but more harmful categories such as knife and gun crime.

(Image: Reuters)

"The first year-on-year comparisons from new estimates of fraud, one of the most frequently occurring crimes, indicate fewer incidents were experienced by the general population compared with the previous year."

It also comes after the number of frontline officers fell by around 20,000 under the Tories.

But Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said: "These figures are truly shocking and should put an end to Government complacency on crime.

"Police numbers are now at their lowest in 30 years. You can't fight crime on the cheap."

The last round of police-recorded figures, in the year to June 2017, showed crime rising by 13%.

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “These statistics show the terrible repercussions around the country of a Government that has been desperately weak on crime for the last eight years, as well as weak on the causes of crime."

Shadow Policing Minister Louise Haigh said: “These shocking figures reveal that the Tories have lost control in the fight against crime. The truth is, the public are now being forced to pay the price for the reckless risk the Tories took with public safety when they slashed 20,000 officers."