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:
Please could you provide me with the number of crimes reported to your force that include the word "Tinder" (referring to the dating app only) AND whereby the victim of the offence is under the age of 18.
Please provide this information broken down into categories - e.g., rape, sexual activity with a minor, blackmail, etc. - and for EACH of the following years:
2019
2020
2021
2022
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.
|
Offence |
Total |
|
Causing a child under 16 to watch a sexual act offender under 18 |
1 |
|
Causing or inciting a female child under 16 to engage in sexual activity - offender 18 or over - penetration |
1 |
|
Rape of a female aged 16 or over |
2 |
|
Total |
4 |
The below caveats should be noted when viewing the response:
- The data has been taken from systems where the MO text included the keyword 'Tinder'.
- As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the Crime MO. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Also, we cannot search the crime investigation screens/additional information screens, if the terms are not used within the MO the crime will not be identified. The MO search is limited to the first 242 characters of the MO, any information beyond that will not be searched.
- The data was then filtered for those offences where the victim was under the age of 18.
- The data has been provided in a way which avoids the use of exemptions to withhold due to the very low numbers. It will not be broken down further.
- 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.
