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Raves - 1161/20

Date Responded 25 August 2020

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 make the following Freedom of Information request with regards to details of unlicensed music events (UMEs) and/or illegal raves reported to and attended by officers from your police force in 2020 and 2019.

For each UME/illegal rave reported to and attended by officers, I would like to know the following:

  1. The date of UME/illegal rave
  2. Its location (as specific as possible)
  3. Details of the event, including the approx. number of people in attendance
  4. Whether any sections were issued
  5. Whether any arrests were made
  6. Whether any equipment or vehicles were seized
  7. Any other details of actions were taken by your police force in regards to the monitoring and termination of each event

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.

Regarding the information supplied below the following points should be noted:

  • There is no legal definition of a rave so your request is difficult to quantify, all incidents where the word 'rave' is included within the first three lines of the incident description have been read through to establish whether this is an 'illegal rave'.  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.
  • We have not included incidents where the property is a dwelling as this is considered to be a party rather than a rave.
  • Only incidents confirmed as an illegal rave have been included, those incidents where the participants are playing 'rave' music and are gathering in numbers are not included unless they are confirmed to be taking part in an illegal rave.

Bearing the above in mind please see the below:

  1. 25/06/2020.
  2. Town Moor, Great North Road, Newcastle.
  3. 100-150.
  4. Please see point 7 below.
  5. No.
  6. No.
  7. Dispersal order put in place/Turned music off and liaised with the organisers/Gathering disbanded peacefully.

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.

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