Released Under Investigation (1601A/21)
Request
Please provide the following:
1a) from 2018- 2021 (Now) please provide the number of individuals Released Under Investigation.
1b) linked to 1a please break down this data into a monthly format.
1c) linked to 1a please confirm the current status/outcome (this is an example of what I refer to with dummy data):
e.g in September 2018 – 100 were released under investigation of those 100: No Futher Action was taken for 50, 25 were charged and 25 remain currently under investigation.
2) Does the West Midlands Police Force have or plan to implement any policy or process similar to other forces to mitigate costs of long investigations with no results. Some forces, for certain crimes, encourage No further action to be taken if no new evidence has come after 1-2 years of investigating. This is so they can focus on crimes of greater public interest/impact or with a higher chance of charges being pursued and so they can mitigate waste of valuable police resources.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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.