Domestic abuse - 477/18

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:

Could you please give me a breakdown of the number of domestic abuse reports for 2017/18,

broken down by the gender of the perpetrator/accused? 

And, if possible, a break down by the age of the alleged perpetrator/accused for that same year? 

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. 

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows. 

As per our previous correspondence, most of this information  is already in the public domain and that information is therefore subject to the below exemption being applicable. 

As the information you have requested for the first 9 months of 2017/18 is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.  You should therefore consider this a refusal for those parts of  your request. 

I have provided an explanation to this exemption below. 

Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means 

Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information. 

As per our previous e mail directing you to where this information could be found, this part of your request is available in FOI 108/18.

With regards to the outstanding time period I respond as below and as attached.  This will provide you with information which provides a full response to your query. 

The first two tables gives a gender and age breakdown for domestic violence records created between 01/01/2018 and 31/03/2018 - these are attached to incidents. These records are created with a victim and a suspect and therefore those in the 'unknown' category are where the suspect gender or age is not known. 

The second two tables gives a gender and age breakdown for suspects associated with a domestic violence related crime which have been created between 01/01/2018 and 31/03/2018. These are any crimes which are associated with a domestic abuse incident and have a suspect attached. As above, those in the 'unknown' category are where the suspect gender or age is not known. As there may be multiple suspects for each crime and/or crimes without a suspect, I have provided a separate count of domestic violence crimes.