Please be aware we’re making some improvements and building a new website. You can still report incidents, tell us about general intelligence or talk to us on live chat on this site. Thanks for your patience.

Murder-Suicide - 1265/20

Date Responded 07 September 2020

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:

I am emailing you to request anonymous data under the Freedom of Information Acts (2000 and 2002). I would like to request the following information on murder-suicide. For the purposes of this request, I am defining murder-suicide as ‘murder followed by the suicide of the perpetrator(s) within one week’.

I would like to request the following information for the years 1st January 2015 to 31st December 2018 inclusive:

  1. In total (for all ages), how many murder-suicide incidents were recorded in your force between 1st January 2015 and 31st December 2018? Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60)
  2. How many of these murder-suicides (number not percentage please) involved a victim who was aged 60 or over? Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60)
  3. How many murders involving a victim aged 60 or over were recorded during the same period (number not % please) Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60). Please note - this question is designed to allow me to ascertain how many murders of older people are murder-suicide cases.
  4. For each of the recorded murder-suicide cases involving an older victim (60 or over) (as per question 2, above), please provide the victim, offender and crime details on an individual case basis as per the attached table - if possible please complete a table for each recorded offence or provide the same information in a different format if preferred but please provide this on an individual basis - please do not aggregate the information).

This request has been carefully designed to ensure the data requested is anonymous (e.g. using age categories rather than asking for specific ages, not requesting any personal data on victims or suspects such as names, addresses, date of birth and so on). I am seeking information on closed cases only.

After we sought clarity you advised:

Further to this request I am emailing to provide clarification on the terminology used. The term perpetrator has been used to describe suspects - I would be grateful if you could proceed with this request for data on murder followed by suicides within a week and provide the requested victim and suspect characteristics.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Crime Department of Northumbria Police.  I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

You should note that on this occasion we have considered no harm in the release of the information below, however it should not be assumed that this will be the case should further detail be requested or should similar future requests be made. 

  1. 1 x 2018 – nil for other years.
  2. None
  3. 1 x 2017,  1 x 2018
  4. N/A as point 2 is nil.

 

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

back to top