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 the number of police reports, per city/borough, of indecent exposure from neighbours between the following periods:
- 1st January 2021 - Present
- 1st January 2020 - 31st December 2020
- 1st January 2019 - 31st December 2019
In Response:
I am able to disclose the located information to you with the below caveats noted:
- 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.
- An incident search was conducted for incidents that were of the following types: 'Sexual offence' and 'All other sexual offences'. As this produced in excess of 4,700 incidents, they were further refined by those that had the word 'neighbour' in the incident description, the results were then reviewed to find those that were relevant to the request. It should be noted that we are only able to search the first three lines of the incident description. It is possible that one of the keywords may feature later in the incident description but if so, that incident will not be captured in this dataset.
- Crimes were then searched for the offence 'Exposure', this yielded in excess of 500 results, again this was refined by searching for the word 'neighbour' in the MO.
- As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the Crime MO. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Also, we cannot search the crime investigation screens/additional information screens, if the terms are not used within the MO the crime will not be identified. The MO search is limited to the first 242 characters of the MO, any information beyond that will not be searched.
- Please note that 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.
With all the above caveats noted, our searches, as detailed above, brought back the following results:
| District | 2019-2021 |
| Gateshead | 1 |
| Newcastle | 4 |
| North Tyneside | 4 |
| Northumberland | 1 |
| South Tyneside | 2 |
| Sunderland | 4 |
| Total | 16 |
|
Force Wide Annual Totals |
||
|
2019 |
2020 |
2021 |
|
5 |
6 |
5 |
