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 women that reported domestic abuse related incidents or offences.
a)In 2019 to date; and
b) In any of the previous five calendar years
2. Please disaggregate this data by those who were British citizens and those who were not.
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
As per our acknowledgement, this will be aggregated with the two similar requests submitted by your organisation, due to cost/time constraints.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within 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 is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold.
Your submission will capture any female making such a report and not necessarily the victim. Each report would require a manual review to establish the nationality and the gender of the person reporting. This cannot be achieved within the 18 hours. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 18 hours, 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.
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 your request as above with point 1 reworded to request the number of victims which reported domestic abuse that were female.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
