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. How many incidents have been reported to your force of thefts being carried out in Churches or on church property from July 2020-to as close to present as possible?
a. If possible, please could you clarify how many of the thefts recorded relate to lead being taken from the church roof?
2. How many incidents have been reported to your force of vandalism being carried out on Churches / church property from July 2020 to as close to present as possible?
3. How many incidents have been reported to your force of physical/ violent assaults being carried out in Churches or on church property from July 2020 -to as close to present as possible?
Note: If it is the case that ‘church’ is not logged as a location, please do include search to contain log of ‘religious building/s’.
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 with the following caveats noted:
• A manual review of all theft crimes has been undertaken to establish if they relate to the theft of lead from the roof.
• The count of vandalism crimes relates to the number of criminal damage crimes.
• Threats of assault or stalking have not been included in the final question. The one crime that has been noted was a dog attack.
• Date period is 01/07/2020 through 16/08/2021.
• We do have a location identified as "church" which has been used in the above.
1. 25 (9 of the thefts relate to lead being taken off the roof)
2. 61
3. 1
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
