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:
For the calendar years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and for 2023 so far
1. How many phones; bag; and bags containing a phone(s) thefts were reported, broken down by the year and the months these happened.
2. Whether they were stolen on bikes, on foot, in cars etc.
3. The victim’s location at the time of incident i.e. shopping centre, street, car.
4. Outcome of case i.e. resolved, closed etc.
5. Time it took to reach outcome of the case.
6. Models of phones reported.
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 by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, particularly at questions 2 and 6 would entail a member of staff manually searching over 28,500 records. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 2375 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.
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 questions 1, 3, 4, and 5.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
