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:
- how many Ring Doorbell or other doorbell cameras crime cases have been reported in the past 5 years in your area?
- Can this information be broken down by year and nature of the crime?
- Could it be possible to also see the number (or %) of the above cases that were solved?
- how many Ring Doorbell or other doorbell cameras crime cases have been reported in the past 5 years in your area?
- Can this information be broken down by year and nature of the crime?
- Could it be possible to also see the number (or %) of the above cases that were solved?
After we sought clarity on your submission you advised:
Ring Doorbell for example theft of the doorbell itself, or the doorbell used to access information whether residents are home (ie hacked).
‘other doorbell cameras’? - doorbell cameras (ring doorbell is a brand so by other doorbell cameras I meant other ones that are not specifically ring doorbell brand).
Past 5 year? - Past 5 financial years.
Please clarify what your definition of ‘solved’ is ? As a solved/resolved crime.
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.
As the information requested at point 1 alone is not recorded in an easily searchable format in order to establish a response at this point it would require approximately 311 records to be located and manually reviewed to establish which were related to a doorbell camera or other kind of smart doorbell. 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 26 hours, with additional time being required to provide a response to the remaining points. 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, in order to provide you with further assistance under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I can advise you that an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be for all questions above but limited to a 1 year period.
If this would be useful you may wish to define and resubmit your request accordingly, however please note that any further request will be aggregated with this one due to the cost/time implications under the Acts legislation.
