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:
Can you please provide the following information in regards to domestic burglaries between Apr’18 - Mar’19, within the enforcement area - or the most up to date annual time period you have available.
- How many residential burglaries were committed in the enforcement area
- What were the points of entry used to gain entry i.e. how many by door (front or rear), window (front, rear, upper or lower) or other
- What were the methods to gain entry i.e. how many used a key, were insecure (walked in), attacked door, attacked window, climbed in or other
- What time the incidents occurred i.e. how many occurred in the morning, afternoon, evening, nighttime
- Type of damage and estimated cost of damage incurred by incidents
- Cost of stolen items in incidents i.e how many incidents results in £0 - £50 worth of stolen items, £51 – 100 worth of stolen items, £101 – 200 worth of stolen items etc.
- Offender characteristics in incidents i.e. age group, gender, number of offenders, ethnicity
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 requested is not held statistically nor is it held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour time constraints. Initial searches for all domestic burglaries for the time period requested returned in excess of 5,000 such crimes. To provide a response to this request would require a manual review of all those reports. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 250 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.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under Section 16 of the Act would normally entail that we contact you to determine whether it is possible to refine the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limits. However, from the information we have outlined above I see no reasonable way in which we can do so.
