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. Please can you provide the number of victims aged over 65 for violent offences, namely:
a) Common assault
b) Actual Bodily Harm
c) Inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm
d) Causing Grievous Bodily Harm
For the calendar years 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.
2. If there is time, please could you separately break down the figures by the victims’ age?
3. If there is time, please can you provide any further information about the nature of what happened?
In Response:
As advised in our acknowledgement the wording “if there is time” has been removed from points 2 and 3 for the reasons explained in the acknowledgement.
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.
Searches were made on all crimes which fall under Common Assault, Assault S.47, Assault S.18 or Assault S.20 where the victim is recorded as being over 65 at the time the offence was committed. The figures provided are a count of victims - so any victim of the same offence in the same year will only be counted once. If this person was victim of a different offences or the same offences but in different years, they will be counted for each offence/each year. Therefore summing this data may result in duplication.
The victims are broken down by age, by offence and by year. Any victim of the same offence in the same year will only be counted once (unless their birthday fell between offences in which case they will be counted once in each age category)
For Q3 – we have included any offences where a firearm or a knife (according to Home Office recording guidelines) were listed as a weapon.
To note - the overall year on year trend is similar between all ages and those over 65. Both are increasing at a similar rate which is largely due to the improvements in crime recording.
With the above noted I am able to disclose the located information to you as attached .
