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:
I would like data on the total number of domestic abuse-related offences recorded by the force between 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, broken down by the victim’s ethnicity. Please send me:
- The number and type of crime outcomes recorded for domestic-abuse related offences, broken down by sex and ethnicity of the victim. Please only include offences that have been assigned an outcome, and group them by the year the outcome was recorded rather than the year the crime took place.
- Of the cases that resulted in a charge or summons in part 1 of this request (by year the outcome was recorded), please provide a breakdown of the sex and ethnicity of the suspect, whilst retaining the breakdown of the sex and ethnicity of the victim
- The number of times a suspect was arrested in relation to a domestic abuse-related offence, broken down by the sex and ethnicity of the suspect and of the victim
- The number of women who sought a domestic abuse protection order, by ethnicity
- The number of women who were granted a domestic abuse protection order, by ethnicity
- The number of men who sought a domestic abuse protection order, by ethnicity
- The number of men who were granted a domestic abuse protection order, by ethnicity
In Response:
To establish a response at each of the points 4, 5, 6 and 7 alone would require in excess of 1,000 domestic abuse protection orders, given in the period specified, to be located and manually reviewed to establish a response for each of the points identified above. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 83 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, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information below, relative to your request, retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.
For points 1, 2 and 3 please see the attached document, which should satisfy your queries, however the following caveats should be noted in regards to the data supplied:
- The data has been taken from the central database using the crime, disposals, arrests and victim tables. The data was then collated and scrutinised for duplicates. The duplicates were then manually reviewed to ensure that the highest outcome recorded was included.
- The following outcomes have not been included in the response to question 1 - Await youth surgery / CPS advice / CPS no prosecution / Detention refused / Fail to respond / No further action / Offender deceased / Police bail / Police bail - CPS / Police bail - enquiries / Taken into consideration / Under investigation.
- The number of arrests in question 3 is greater than the number of offences in question 1 as question 1 only includes offences where there has been an outcome. Question 3 has had duplicate arrests removed for the same crime.
