Crime - 709/18

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. The number of violent crime offences recorded by Northumbria Police between the 25/06/2018 and 16/07/2018, broken down by date and time
2. The type of offence recorded
3. Whether an arrest was made 

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, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons. 

The information requested at question 3 is held, however in order to find out if an arrest was made as part of the investigations, each crime would have to be manually reviewed to determine if it was for a violent crime.  Even at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take well over the permitted 18 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 your request. 

Although excess cost removes Northumbria Police's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information in the attached document, relative to questions 1 and 2, which was retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request. 

The data was collated through a search of all violent crimes recorded between 25/06/2018 and 16/07/2018. These have been broken down by time and date of recording .  Please note that the crimes may not have occurred at the time of recording for example in cases of historic sexual offences.  They are also broken down by type of offence according to PSgroup3 categories.