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 reported - or incidents to which police were called - to your force relating to physical or verbal abuse of a victim due to having ginger or red hair from January 1, 2021 to November 15, 2021;
- A keyword search of police records to show how many times the words 'ginger', 'red hair' and 'redhead' appear in crime reports from January 1, 2021 to November 15, 2021.
In Response:
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.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, particularly question 1 in regards to crimes only would entail a member of staff manually searching over 844 records. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 42 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. Additional time would also be required to check incidents, of which there would be a higher count of than crimes.
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under 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 for question 2.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
