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 and every financial year between 2015-16 and 2018-19, please could you provide me with:
- The total number of domestic abuse incidents reported to your force versus the total number subsequently recorded as a domestic abuse crime.
- For each domestic abuse crime in Q1, could you specify the gender of the victim as either male, female, transgender, or unknown.
- For the domestic abuse crimes in Q1 involving only male victims, could you specify:
- Their exact age and not ‘18-24’, for example.
- The relationship between the victim and the alleged perpetrator (i.e. partner, parent, relative etc)
- The gender and age of the alleged perpetrator.
- The five most common crimes against a male victim reported to you falling within the domestic abuse marker (i.e. assault, sexual assault, harassment, etc.)
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 is not held in a format that allows its retrieval within the permitted 18 our threshold. This is particularly relevant at point 3 b. To provide a response to this part alone would require in excess of 18000 crime records to be manually reviewed. Even at a conservative estimate of 4 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 1200 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 for your request.
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 the remaining questions.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
