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 reported "countryside thefts" for the years of 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Countryside thefts: farm plant/ machinery stolen, fuel stolen from farms, thefts from outbuildings.
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 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 all the below noted.
• 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.
• The data has been taken from systems for Crimes where either of the two ‘location’ fields included the keyword 'farm'. Wind farms were removed from the dataset.
With the above noted I respond as follows.
Data as of 16/02/23.
Offence Type | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |||
Burglary - Business and Community | 71 | 21 | 17 | 14 | 4 | |||
Burglary - residential | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3 | - | |||
Criminal damage - Dwelling | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | - | |||
Criminal damage - Other | 45 | 46 | 65 | 31 | 3 | |||
Criminal damage - Other than dwelling | 1 | 4 | 5 | 4 | - | |||
Criminal damage - Vehicle | 2 | 9 | 6 | 2 | - | |||
Other theft and handling | 53 | 36 | 27 | 30 | 6 | |||
Shoplifting | - | - | 1 | - | - | |||
TFMV | 10 | 1 | 4 | 4 | - | |||
Theft from the person | 1 | - | - | - | - | |||
Theft of a pedal cycle | 1 | - | - | - | - | |||
TWOC | 12 | 10 | 7 | 13 | 3 | |||
Vehicle Interference | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 |