Community resolution - 183/19

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:

1.Firstly, I would like to see a copy of the force’s guidance as it pertains to the issuing of community resolutions.

Then, for each community resolution recorded as a crime outcome in 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18, please provide the following information, broken down by financial year, force name, offence description, offence group, offence sub group and offence code

1. Were victims of the crime, where victim or victims were identified, consulted about the community resolution prior to it being issued? Y/N
2. Where victims were consented prior to the community resolution order being issued, did the victim consent to the issuing of the order? Y/N
3. Where victims have not been consulted or not agreed to the CRO being issued, was a supervisor consulted? Y/N
4. Did the supervisor, where applicable, consent to the issuing of the CRO? Y/N
5. Where victims were not consulted or did not agree, please provide the officer’s recorded rationale for issuing the CRO.
6. Was the offence identified as domestic abuse? Y/N
7. Was the offence identified as hate crime? Y/N
8. Did the offender accept responsibility?
9. Did the offender agree to the CRO?
10. What was the recorded resolution? i.e. apology letter; financial recompense; etc
11. What was the age of the offender?
12. What was the gender of the offender?

In Response:

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 however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

The information requested is not held in a format that allows the extraction of the details requested within the permitted 18 hours.  Initial searches for the time period requested have brought back in excess of 11,000 records, each of which would require manual review to extract the level of detail you are asking us to retrieve.  Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 550 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00

You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.

As parts of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be the following questions, for the years 2016/17 and 2017/18 only.

1. Was the offence identified as domestic abuse? Y/N (use of qualifier only)
2. Was the offence identified as hate crime? Y/N (use of qualifier only)
3. What was the age of the offender?
4. What was the gender of the offender?