Stalking - 211/20

Date Responded 03 March 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 stalking incidents for each calendar year between and including 2009 to 2019. I would also like to obtain the data on the gender of the victims.

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.

Please note that the information provided below has been read to focus on crimes, rather than incidents – this is due to the fact that we do not hold this level of data regarding incidents. Notably, we cannot return victim gender.

Incidents are also all held under "Stalking and Harassment" and as such it is not possible to distinguish between the two without an in-depth examination of each case.

It should be noted that the increase in data between 2017 and 2018 corresponds to a change in the Home Office counting rules. In April 2018 offences of harassment and stalking started to be recorded in addition to the primary offence. Hence the increase in the number of recorded offences is likely to be due to improvements in police recording and increased use of the stalking offence by police.

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.

Bearing the above in mind please see the below:

Year	Count of Stalking Crimes	Female Victims	Male Victims
2000	2	2
2006	1	1
2008	1	1
2010	1	1
2011	3	3
2012	5	5
2013	11	10	1
2014	19	19
2015	21	18	3
2016	37	37
2017	474	416	55
2018	1,196	1,056	138
2019	1,118	977	136
2020	159	137	22
Total	3,048	2,683	355

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.