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 would like to request data on how many racially aggravated incidents or hate crimes have been reported to and/or investigated by Northumbria Police involving victims of Asian descent in the six months between September 1 2020 and March 1 2021. I would also like the same information for the period September 1 2019 to March 1 2020.
On 17 March 2021 you made the following amendment to your request:
“I would like to request data on how many racially aggravated incidents or hate crimes have been reported to and/or investigated by Northumbria Police involving victims who are of Chinese, East Asian and South East Asian descent and/or nationality in the six months between September 1 2020 and March 1 2021. I would also like the same information for the period September 1 2019 to March 1 2020.”
On 23 March 2021 after we advised of the limitations of searching for ‘nationality’, you advised you would be happy with ethnicity, therefore our response below reflects that change.
In Response:
I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.
The following data has been gleaned from a search of the central database, any ethnicity containing the strings "Chinese" or "Asian" has been included. This has resulted in the following self-class ethnicities being counted:
• Any Other Asian
• Chinese
• White and Asian
Date Range Incidents Crimes
01/09/2019 - 01/03/2020 120 166
01/09/2020 - 01/03/2021 161 148
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.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
