Pet Thefts Statistics - 1003/23

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:

a) The number of pet theft incidents reported to your force in each of the following financial years (2020/2021, 2021/2022 and 2022/2023);

b) The number of those reports that resulted in a charge or summons, also broken down by financial year; and

c) The number of those reports where the investigation was closed with no suspect identified, also broken down by financial year.

In Response:

As advised earlier this request has been aggregated with your requests (FOI 1004/23 and 1006/23) with regards to time constraints under the Act, as they refer to the same subject area – Thefts.

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 attached with the below noted when viewing the figures:

• The data has been taken from Systems using the Property associated with crime and where the HO Group was 'Theft and handling Stolen goods'.  The data was then refined to stolen and recovered and then reviewed to discover those items that could be classed as a pet, for this reason the type of animal has been included in the summary.
• 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.