Domestic Abuse - 248/22

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

“ for the past 3 years

4. How may complaints of domestic abuse did the force receive where the accused is a serving police officer or member of staff?
5. How many of the accused were men?
6. How many were women?
7. What were the outcomes of the complaints? “

In Response:

To note – we are taking last 3 years to be 2019 – 2021

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Professional Standards Department of Northumbria Police.  I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you with the following noted.

• Our response relates to the number of ‘reports’ received and not solely complaints.  There was one ‘complaint’ within the date range, which is included below.
• The other reports of domestic abuse are ones that Northumbria Police were made aware of and resulted in a ‘misconduct’ investigation.

• It is worth noting that police officers cannot formally ‘complain’ about each other, accordingly, in order to provide as full a response as possible, reports of ‘misconduct’ have also been looked for and these have been included in the below response.

Year	No Of Complaints	Accused		Outcome
		Male	Female
2019	4	1	3	4 x No misconduct identified
2020	6	5	1	1 x No case to answer 4 x no misconduct identified 1 x Reflective Practice
2021	2	1	1	1 x Reflective Practice 1 x No further action

 

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete.  However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes.  The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.  As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.