Stop & Account, Stop & Search and Vehicle Stops - 984/20

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. Statistics broken down by year and by ethnicity for the last five years (April to March) for each of the following:

a) Stop and Account
b) Stop and Search
c) Vehicle Stops

2. Please can you tell me the total population for your policing area broken down by year for the last five years (April to March)

3. Please can you tell me the total population broken down by year and by ethnicity for your policing area for the last five years (April to March)

4. If any of the data I’m asking for above isn’t available I’d be grateful to know why and how you record data from stop and account, stop and search and vehicle stops.

I am aware that the Metropolitan Police are required to record stop and accounts on the force intelligence system so I’m assuming the data I've asked for is available in all police forces.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development 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.

1. Stop and Account

Ethnic Appearance	2015/16	2016/17	2017/18	2018/19	2019/20	Total
Asian	228	131	64	30	24	477
Black	146	108	25	18	17	314
Chinese, Japanese, South East Asian	18	22	4		3	47
Middle Eastern	18	11	4	1	5	39
White - North European	26,037	17,047	9,595	3,451	3,276	59,406
White - South European	81	64	32	13	28	218
Other/Unknown	87	81	2,255	2,290	2,204	6,917
Total	26,615	17,464	11,979	5,803	5,557	67,418

 

Stop and Search

Ethnic Appearance	2015/16	2016/17	2017/18	2018/19	2019/20	Total
Asian	227	136	175	159	267	964
Black	123	82	84	90	145	524
Chinese, Japanese, South East Asian	8	2		2	1	13
Middle Eastern	12	15	13	8	11	59
White - North European	6,653	3,453	2,602	2,611	4,732	20,051
White - South European	56	29	54	39	117	295
Other/Unknown	39	18	13	24	36	130
Total	7,118	3,735	2,941	2,933	5,309	22,036

 

Vehicle Stops

Ethnic Appearance	2015/16	2016/17	2017/18	2018/19	2019/20	Total
Asian	70	43	15	10	42	180
Black	4	4	4	4	9	25
Chinese, Japanese, South East Asian	1					1
Middle Eastern	2	2	3			7
White - North European	612	323	122	101	199	1,357
White - South European	2	4	4		10	20
Other/Unknown	1	4	5	3	5	18
Total	692	380	153	118	265	1,608

 

2&3.  As the information requested at both points 2 and 3 is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.  You should therefore consider this a refusal for those parts your request.

I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.

Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means

Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.

This information is freely available from the Office for National Statistic website.  I have provided a link below to the website, from this you will be able to extract the data regarding populations you require.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/

4. N/A.