Drink Spiking (71A/22)
Request
Please could you provide me with this information in connection with drink spiking offences:
- The number of individual reports of suspected drink spiking made to West Midlands Police by members of the public in the period between 01/01/2021 and 31/12/2021 (or the most recent 12-month reporting period).
- The number of urine or blood samples collected for testing from suspected victims of drink spiking between 01/01/2021 and 31/12/2021 (or the most recent 12-month reporting period).
- The number of these collected samples that were tested and the number that were discarded without testing.
Response
Please find attached our response. Please note, data for questions 2 and 3 is not available for the period 01/01/2021 – 30/09/2021.
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.