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 domestic abuse related incidents and crimes suffered by disabled victims reported to you in Northumbria, year by year from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2021.
2. The number of prosecutions for domestic abuse related crimes suffered by disabled victims that resulted in convictions in Northumbria, year by year from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2021.
3. The number of domestic abuse related incidents and crimes reported to you in Northumbria, year by year from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2021.
4. The number of prosecutions for domestic abuse related incidents and crimes that resulted in convictions in Northumbria, year by year from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 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.
The information requested is not currently held statistically nor is it held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold. To provide an accurate response to point 1 alone would require a manual review of 182,791 DV incidents and 121,624 DV crimes that were recorded within the five year period requested, to establish how many actually appear to feature a disabled victim - if this is even present on the log. 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 20294 hours. Likewise for conviction data, 13000 charges would require a review to provide a response to points 4, this in its own right would exceed 866 hours. As such 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 parts 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 point 1 as a count of DV which is also listed as disability hate crime.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
