Crimes Against MPs Since 2016 - 1408/21

Date Responded 16 November 2021

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 crimes against MPs reported to the force since January 2016 until now (Tuesday 19 October). Please can you break this down by year.
A gendered breakdown of crimes reported, e.g. how many reported by men and how many by women, as well as a breakdown of the types of crime, e.g. anti-terror, threats to kill, harassment.
How many of these reported crimes led to arrests?
How many of these reported crimes led to criminal charges?
Of those who were charged following a report of a crime against an MP, what was the outcome at court? And are you able to provide information on the type of crime that led to convictions?

In Response:

I am able to disclose the located information to you with the caveat noted below as follows:

Please note that the data has been presented in such a manner as to avoid the application of exemptions relevant under the Act (Section 40 – Personal Information) to withhold due to low numbers, and these will not be broken down further.

Year	Count
2016	10
2017	8
2018
2019
2020
2021
Total	18

2. We hold no information regarding the gender of the person who reported the crime – this information is not recorded.

Offence Type	Count
Burglary	1
Criminal Damage	1
Harassment	12
Other Violence	2
Public Disorder	2
Total	18

3. 2

4. 1

5. 1

Any data provided above for low numbers will not be broken down further, and by withholding this data we will rely on the following exemption:

Section 40 (2) - Personal Information

Section 40(2) is a class based absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest in disclosure. That being said where Section 40(2) is engaged in order to make the exemption absolute there needs to be evidence that the disclosure of the information requested would lead to identifying individuals and place information pertaining to them into the public domain. This constitutes personal data which would, if released, be in breach of the rights provided by the Data Protection Act 2018 and General Data Protection Regulations; namely the first data protection principle, which states that personal data will be processed lawfully, fairly and transparently.

It is our view that the request runs counter to the three requirements prescribed by law and that there is no lawful basis to provide this information to you. Furthermore, the question of fairness and transparency is not met either as the data subject(s) in question would have no expectation that their personal data would be provided to an FOIA applicant and processed in this way.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, you should consider this as a refusal for those parts of your request under section 17 of the Act.

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.