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:
For all crimes that fall under the home office offence sub group of "stalking and harassment" between January 2014 and January 2020 (inclusive of both of those months), please provide the number of crimes that include the keywords "Facebook", "Twitter", "Instagram", "Snapchat", "Whatsapp" or "TikTok" in the modus operandi report. Please also provide the dates that each of these incidents took place. If you have a flag for online/cyber crimes, please tell me how many of these crimes were flagged as such.
For the most recent 100 crimes, please provide the contents of the modus operandi report.
For all crimes that fall under the home office offence sub group of "stalking and harassment" between January 2014 and January 2020 (inclusive of both of those months), please provide the number of crimes that include the keywords "Tinder", "Hinge", "Grindr" or "Bumble" in the modus operandi report. Please also provide the dates that each of these incidents took place. If you have a flag for online/cyber crimes, please tell me how many of these crimes were flagged as such.
For the most recent 100 crimes, please provide the contents of the modus operandi report.
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 is a result of searches using the keywords as supplied by yourself for all HO codes relating to stalking and harassment - for context, the following:
Offence Code Offence Description
008/56 Racially or religiously aggravated harassment or stalking without violence
008/58 Racially or religiously aggravated harassment or stalking
008/65 Stalking involving fear of violence
008/66 Stalking involving serious alarm/distress
195/12 Stalking without fear / alarm / distress
As with any keyword search, this FOI is limited to exact matches of that keyword. Any incorrect spelling would not be returned.
Please note there are some crimes which contain multiple instances of the keywords. These have been counted once per question; for example, if one crime included the term "Facebook" and the term "Whatsapp" it would be counted once in Q1, if it contained the term "Facebook" and the term "Tinder" it would be counted once in Q1 and once in Q2.
Bearing the above in mind please see the attached document which should satisfy the queries in your request.
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.
