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:
- The number of hate crimes that have taken place against members of the Sikh Community going back past 5 years.
- The number of recorded crimes classed as "Islamophobia" which were not against Muslim victims.
After we sought clarity you defined the ‘past 5 years’ as last 5 financial years 2015/16 – 2019/20 for both points 1 & 2.
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 in part by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. For the time period requested Northumbria Police have recorded 649 hate crimes applicable to this submission. Each of these would require a manual review to establish which crimes did not have a Muslim victim in order to offer a response to point 2. Even at a conservative estimate of 4 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to locate, extract and compile this information would take over 43 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.
In order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be the questions as above but for a two year period only.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
If you are to resubmit can you also advise if we are to include crimes where graffiti of an anti-Muslim nature have been crimed but the victim is not specific.
