Murders and Manslaughters (1435A/21)
Request
Please supply the following information regarding all murder and manslaughter offences in the West Midlands since April 1st 2017
1) how many murders were there?
2) How many manslaughters were there?
3) in those offences above, how many victims were on police bail, court bail or released under investigation for a drug related offence at the time of their death?
4) in those offences above, how many named suspects in the murder / manslaughter cases were at the time of the offence on police bail, court bail or released under investigation for a drug offence
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because the information for questions 3 & 4 is not centrally collated and would therefore require manually reviewing each individual record of murder and manslaughter, of which there are 218 for the requested time period. To conduct this manual search however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the information requested for questions 1 & 2 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this below.
1) Between the 1st April 2017 and the 13th October 2021, West Midlands Police recorded 208 murders.
2) Between the 1st April 2017 and the 13th October 2021, West Midlands Police recorded 10 manslaughters.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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