Communications Act Offences - 1009/22

Date Responded 27 July 2022

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:

The number of people that were arrested for the offence of 008/72 Offences under the Malicious Communications Act 1988) from 1 January 2016 only (broken down by year).

In Response:

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

As advised in our acknowledgement email this request has been aggregated with your previous request (FOI 790/22) with regards to time constraints under the Act, as they refer to the same subject area.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development 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 as follows.

Year	Arrests
2016	32
2017	48
2018	77
2019	82
2020	119
2021	73
2022	45
Grand Total	476

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.