Social Media Offences - 1392/19

Date Responded 06 January 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:

The number of incidents reported to your force over the last two financial years involving Instagram, broken down by year.
The number of incidents reported to your force over the last two financial years involving Facebook, broken down by year.
Could you also include police notes around the nature of the incident e.g. online grooming, harassment, fraud, theft etc. and any other relevant details.

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 with the caveat below noted

These figures have been gathered by a search for the key words “ Facebook” and “Instagram” in the description of the incident. If the words "Facebook" or "Instagram" have not been used (eg, the words "social media" used instead) the incident will not be included. There are some cases where both Instagram and Facebook have been noted in the descriptor.

Additionally to fully offer a response to point 3 would have exceeded the 18 hour threshold and your request would have been refused under Section 12. In order to avoid this we have provided the opening codes descriptor only, to produce a breakdown of incident type.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would expect that you to take into consideration the factors highlighted above so as not to mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.

With all the above in mind please see the below.

1&2.

Financial Year End	Instagram	Facebook
31/03/2019	5	31
31/03/2020	332	2101

Summary	Count - Instagram	Count - Facebook
Concern for Safety	45	428
Stalking and Harassment	55	367
Other Notifiable Crime (inc. Bomb Hoaxes)	35	171
Suspicious Activity	38	158
Generic Public Safety	20	127
Child Sexual Exploitation/Grooming	25	7
Domestic Incident	14	206
TRANSPORT, inc RTC, Marine/Aircraft/ Road off	3	16
Violence	36	311
Anti Social Behaviour (All)	15	159
Sexual Offence	40	24
Criminal Damage	1	19
Missing Person	2	23
Generic Administration	7	49
Theft	1	59
Robbery	0	1
Burglary	0	4
Vehicle Crime	0	3

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.