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Harassment, Alarm, Distress - 926/23

Date Responded 14 July 2023

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 provide the number of cases of intentional harassment, alarm or  distress (Public Order Act 1986 Sec. 4A) reported to your force  between January 1st and December 31st 2022. Your force may record this  under classification code 125/09.

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.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

Crimes 6,857.

There were 833 incidents with a closing code of stalking/harassment.  Of those reports, 691 were crimed and will be included in the total above.

The below should be noted when viewing the figures above:

  • It should be noted that not all incidents are crimed and that crimes can be logged without an incident being created.
  • The data has been taken from Systems where there was an offence of 'Causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress' or there was a closing code for the incident of 'stalking/harassment'.
  • Each incident is given a final incident code and two qualifying codes.  These codes are applied according to priority in relation to the incident.  It is possible that qualifiers searched for relating to this FOI have not been recorded due to other qualifying codes taking precedence, in this case these incidents will not be captured in the final dataset.
  • 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.
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