Domestic violence crimes - 251/18

Date Responded 10 April 2018

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:

Please can you tell me over the last 5 years: calendar years from January 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 to December 31st 2017

how many domestic violence crimes have been reported to the police
how many of these cases have been investigated
how many cases led to an arrest
how many cases led to a prosecution
if the prosecution failed please can you give me the reason stated

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 within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police, however, cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

The information specific to your request at question 5 is not held in a format that allows its retrieval within the permitted time constraints. The only way to obtain the reason for a case failing would be to examine each one. For the time period of your request, there have been thousands of cases which would take at least 15 minutes to review each one. We have estimated that to extract this information would take that part of your request over the 18 hour threshold. 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 that part of your request.

Although excess cost removes Northumbria Police's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information below, relative to your remaining questions which was 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.

Year	Number of Crimes
2013	5541
2014	7184
2015	9195
2016	14662
2017	21257
Total	57839

2. All crimes are investigated.

Year	Number of Arrests
2013	4394
2014	5402
2015	5212
2016	4321
2017	3541
Total	22870

4.
Method of Disposal	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	Total
Charge/Summons	3061	3764	3834	3385	3436	17480
Charge/Summons Alternative offence			1	74	13	88
Total	3061	3764	3835	3459	3449	17568

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.