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:
Broken down by year, for each of the past four years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (up until today, 11/10))
1. The number of incidents of spiking reported to you
2. The number of these spiking reports investigated by you
3. The outcomes of these investigations
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within 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 with the caveats to be noted as follows:
• At point 1 you ask for “incidents”, however it should be noted that at the point of reporting, we would raise a crime in relation to these cases. As such the data below is based on crimes.
• The results below are based on searches of the following offences:
- Administering poison so as to endanger life
- Administering poison with intent to injure or annoy
- Administering a substance with intent
• We have also included cases wherein the Method-Means states SPD Spike Drink
• Please note that some of the data has been presented in such a manner as to avoid the application of exemptions relevant under the Act (Section 40 – Personal Information) to withhold, due to low numbers, and these will not be broken down further.
• It should be noted that drink spiking can take place in locations other than bars and nightclubs, for example domestic or residential homes. These incidences will be included in this dataset.
1&3. The number of crimes and outcomes:
|
Outcome |
2018 |
2019 |
2020 |
2021 |
|
Caution adult |
2 |
|||
|
Evidential difficulties |
11 |
5 |
4 |
3 |
|
Investigation complete - no suspect identified |
20 |
15 |
14 |
11 |
|
Not stated |
0 |
0 |
0 |
4 |
|
Victim declines or is unable to identify suspect Victim does not support police action |
6 |
7 |
3 |
6 |
3. All reported crimes are investigated.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
