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. In relation to the community resolution procedure, please show the number of reported crimes concluded in this manner for each of the following years: 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 & 2017.2. Please show each year separately, listing the different crime types, where a report has been resolved by such. Show the number of each crime type.
3. Does the victim of the crime have to consent to the procedure?
4. If so, how is the victim’s consent recorded?
5. Once an incident, which has been recorded as crime, is resolved by "community resolution", how is the crime report concluded?
6. In particular, is the crime shown as "detected" or is "no crimed" or is there another method of showing the crime report as complete?
7. For each of the annual totals, please state how many of the community resolutions were used, despite the suspect having a previous warning, conviction or caution.
8. Please send a copy of your Force policy or other document, which explains how the policy should be used by your officers and staff.
In Response:
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 Corporate Development and Criminal Justice Departments 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 at question 7 is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. In 2017 alone, Community Resolution was used as a primary outcome 2277 times. To respond to this part of your request would require a manual review of each of those records associated with the offender to establish if they had a previous conviction, caution or warning. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take well over the permitted 189 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This would be considerably more to cover all of the years data you have requested. 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 part 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 questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 8.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
