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:
For each of the calendar years, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 how many crimes have been recorded in which the victim is a taxi driver?For clarity, I am looking for crimes against taxi drivers which happened while they were working – ie their job was relevant to the crime.
For each return please state the nature of the crime for example GBH and if possible a brief narrative summary of the incident.
I would be grateful if you could also state the outcome. For example charged, caution ongoing, no suspect identified.
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.
There is no occupation field attached to the victim table to identify ‘taxi driver’. The only way to identify them is to use a keyword search on the Modus Operandi screen. We have searched for the word ‘taxi’ in the MO for 33 months of crime data. This brought back 5,045 crimes that have the word taxi in the MO. Each crime would require manual review to ascertain which crimes fitted the criteria of your request. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that this exercise would take over 252 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
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under Section 16 of the Act would normally entail that we contact you to determine whether it is possible to refine the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limits. However, due to the numbers of records involved in this request, I am unable to provide a suggestion as to how to refine your request to bring it within the retrievable cost threshold.
