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:
1. The total number of reports of theft from a person received for the following electronic devices in each of the years 2020, 2021 and 2022:
Broken down by device category as follows:
Laptops
Tablets
Smartphones
Smartwatches
2. The total number of reports received of theft from a person in each of the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 where one of the following was reported to have been used as the crime was committed:
Moped
Motorbike
Electric Scooter
Bike
E-Bike
Car
3. The total number of reports received of theft from a person in each of the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 where there was a report of a weapon being used, or the victim suffering injury.
4. The number of people aged under 18, divided by the age brackets below, who have been charged with theft from a person in each of the years ended 2020, 2021 and 2022:
Under 10 years of age
11-12
13-14
15-16
17
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
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, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, particularly at question 2 and at the injury data at part of point 3, would entail a member of staff manually searching over 2000 records. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 166 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.
As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be questions 1 , 3 - where there was a report of a weapon being used & 4 .
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
