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 provide me with data of murders in your police force over the last 10 years (2010-2020 or to the most recent available data). In financial or calendar years, however this information is held.
Broken down by:
- Solved or unsolved - Please include the last outcome category given, and if there are any other status that would be indicative of solved/unsolved crime (e.g. ‘Filed no suspect, no further enquiries’, etc). For each of these murders please provide:
- Victim’s ethnicity (established, self-defined or ethnic appearance).
- Victim’s gender, nationality and age group.
- Offender/Principal suspect ethnicity, gender and nationality.
- Motivation or circumstance of crime (if known) and relationship between offender/principal suspect and victim.
In Response:
To note – this request has been aggregated with your other request – FOI 439/20 – as they are asking for similar information regarding offences.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Crime 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.
The information requested is not held in format that would allow its extraction in order to offer a response to this submission. This is particularly relevant at point 5 as each case would need to be explored to some length in order to identify what was decided to be the final motive. This is often resolved at court so a significant amount of work would be required, which has been estimated as exceeding the 18 hour threshold in its own right.
As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 18 hours, 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.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under 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 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 remaining questions for a 4 year period only.
You should note that other exemptions will be applied where relevant to any resubmitted request.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
To note, any resubmission of 430/20 and 439/20 will also be aggregated due to time/costs.
