Indecent Exposure Statistics - 847/23

Date Responded 22 June 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:

I'm writing to request data on cases of indecent exposure handled by your force in recent years.

1. Please could you provide a yearly breakdown on the number of incidences from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, January 1st to December 31st for each year?

1a. Please can you identify what gender identify the perpetrators and/or the victims are.

2. Please could you also provide the size of the population that you serve- so that we will be able to put it in per capita statistics.

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.

Year	Count
2018	182
2019	169
2020	140
2021	212
2022	190

1a.

Year/Gender	Suspect	Victim	Not recorded
2018	95	149	14
Male	89	32	-
Female	6	116	-
Not recorded	-	1	14
2019	76	151	11
Male	75	26	-
Female	1	125	-
Not recorded	-	-	11
2020	82	114	10
Male	81	25	-
Female	1	89	-
Not recorded	-	-	10
2021	112	196	9
Male	110	39	-
Female	2	156	-
Not recorded	-	1	9
2022	116	169	13
Male	113	39	-
Female	3	129	-
Not recorded	-	1	13

2. As the information you have requested is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You should therefore consider this a refusal for Q.2 of your request.

I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.

Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means

Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.

This data can be found on ONS website, or the ‘about us’ page on the Northumbria Police website.

As it is already freely available s. 21 is applicable.

The below caveats should be noted when viewing the response.

When the victim or suspects identity is unknown, the gender is not recorded. There are occasions where the victim does not wish to engage with the police, in these cases the gender is often not recorded.
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.

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.