999 & 101 Calls - 1209/21

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. I would like to know how many 999/101 calls for service were received by call handlers in calendar years 2019 and 2020 for the entire police force area, broken down by broad disposal types, listed below. I’m not aware of disposal types within your call handling data, however, the broad categories I am seeking are:

• Alarms
• Anti-Social Behaviour
• Concern for Safety
• Crime – requiring emergency response (excluding Domestic Abuse)
• Crime – not requiring emergency response (excluding Domestic Abuse)
• Disturbance
• Domestic Abuse/Domestic Incident
• Missing Persons
• Suspicious Circumstances
• Traffic/Road Related (i.e. RTC, Highway Obstructions etc)
• Total Calls (including any categories not mentioned above)

 

2. %/# of all calls where Mental Health is recorded as a call type/tag/qualifier.

 

3. %/# of all calls where Covid/Social Distancing/Covid Breach is recorded as a call type/tag/qualifier.

 

After we sought clarity on 9^th September, on the 11^th you advised:

I'm seeking a basic overview of all external demand dealt with by your force. I appreciate how/where this is recorded/accessible differs by each police area, and how categories are recorded is inconsistent. Not a problem if they differ to the categories I have specified.

 

To clarify what I meant by crime requiring emergency response - I mean crimes that are reported and are graded as an Emergency/Priority that must be responded to within 10-20mins (whatever the target/redline is for Northumbria - aware this also differs from one force to the next).

In Response:

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 provided has been extracted from a database where the "how reported" field is either "999" or "PHONE."

Incident closing codes have then been used to answer the initial fields provided as best as possible. “Requiring emergency response” has been taken as Priority 1 calls only. Domestic abuse has been counted using the relevant qualifier.

It should be noted that one incident may fall into multiple areas (eg, "Crime requiring emergency response" may also be down as "ASB" or "Traffic/Road Related.") As such the sum total of the incident categories may well not match the number of incidents.

The category of "Disturbance" has not been answered, as this is a very broad definition and we do not have a given code, or set of codes, that match.

The number of COVID/mental health incidents has been provided. Percentage figures are not held.

Obviously, the count for COVID related incidents in 2019 was nil, as the codes were not introduced until partway through 2020.

 

With all the above noted I respond as follows:

Type	2019	2020
Alarms	2055	1655
Anti-Social Behaviour	41633	54433
Concern for Safety	54927	58676
Crime – requiring emergency response (excluding Domestic Abuse)	43317	44461
Crime – not requiring emergency response (excluding Domestic Abuse)	298413	278531
Disturbance	n/a	n/a
Domestic Abuse/Domestic Incident	34728	35909
Missing Persons	13042	11385
Suspicious Circumstances	29281	29142
Traffic/Road Related (i.e. RTC, Highway Obstructions etc)	32582	25323
Total Calls (including any categories not mentioned above)	376458	358901
%/# of all calls where Mental Health is recorded as a call type/tag/qualifier.	14708	21493
%/# of all calls where Covid/Social Distancing/Covid Breach is recorded as a call type/tag/qualifier.	0	13928