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Date Responded 15 July 2022

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 each of the cities within your force area how many reports have there been of vehicle cloning split by year from 2015 to present.

In Response:

I am able to disclose the located information to you with the caveats below noted.

• 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.

• The data has been taken from systems searches where the MO text had the word 'clone' in it. Those records were then reviewed to find those that were relevant to the request. A keyword search was used as this offence is recorded under a number of offence codes and to search through all of them would have made this FOI subject to a section 12 exemption. Rather than refuse your request we have provided what we have been able to search for within the time constraints of the Act.

• 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 384 characters of the MO, any information beyond that will not be searched.

• We have taken the term ‘city’ to relate to the 6 Local Authority areas with the Northumbria Police Force boundaries.

With all the above in mind I can offer the following in response to this submission.

District

Count

Gateshead

17

Newcastle

11

North Tyneside

20

Northumberland

14

South Tyneside

18

Sunderland

24

Total

104

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