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:
- How many cases of stalking were recorded by your police force in 2018 & 2019 Of these cases, how many of the named suspects had previously been named in reports of stalking against:
- the same victim?
- multiple victims?
- From the cases identified at point 1 how many victims were repeat victims of stalking (please provide your definition of repeat victims)?
After we sought clarity you confirmed that points 2 & 3 also related to instances recorded in 2018 & 2019
In Response:
I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows, which has been extracted with extensive searches having to be made and therefore there are caveats attached to the information provided.
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 the above noted please see the below.
- 31 - This includes any cases wherein the same suspect, and the same victim, have been named in different crime reports.
- If there have been multiple cases (eg, the same person stalking the same person more than twice) they have been counted multiple times.
Only cases where the victim has been logged have been included in this count.
340 - Cases where the victim has not been logged have been included in this count as unique in each case.
3. 11 - This has been defined as anyone who has been logged as a victim multiple times within the time period for this crime. This only includes those cases wherein a victim is specified.
Overall Caveats:
This has been read to focus on crimes of stalking, rather than reported incidents. (We would not be able to supply any kind of breakdown regarding personal data for incidents).
I have defined "named in reports of stalking against multiple victims" as a suspect having been named in multiple reports of stalking, rather than a case of stalking against a group of victims.
Other Notes:
Crimes of stalking are counted by the offender.
This means that, for example, if five people were involved in stalking someone, this would relate to five crimes.
During this, a non-specified victim has been assumed to be unique.
Repeat victimisation occurs when the same person or place suffers either crime or personal anti-social behaviour more than once in a three month period, with the exceptions of burglary dwelling and hate crime where the period is 12 months.
