Care Home Thefts (1025A/21)
Request
I am looking for information about reported thefts in care homes. For the purposes of searches, care homes should be taken to include facilities including nursing and residential homes for elderly people but also homes that look after adults with learning disabilities. Please could you provide me with the following:
- How many thefts have been reported to the police in care homes over the last three and and a half calendar years (up to and including June 2021)? Please could you break this information down year by year (2018, 2019, 2020 and the first six months of 2021) and, if possible, month-by-month.
- In each case where a theft has been reported, please could you state what was stolen – what type of item, money etc – and the value, if recorded, of what was reported stolen, as well as a date for when it was reported stolen. Please could you also state the age and the gender of the alleged victim in each case. For each year, please could you provide a total for the value of items/money reported stolen was. I would be grateful if this information could be provided in list form: date, what was stolen/value, age/gender of victim.
- In each case where a theft has been reported, please could you detail whether an individual was charged with a crime/if they were convicted or cleared. If possible, please can detail whether the person charged with the theft was an employee of the care home or not – the latter can be categorised as “other”.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 1025A_21_attachment.xlsx). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
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.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
REASON FOR DECISION
Information with regard to the type of items stolen, the value of items stolen and whether or not a theft involved an employee is not held in an easily retrievable format. Therefore in order to try and determine this detail (if it is even recorded), we would need to conduct a manual review of every case file. Such a search however would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: