Disability Hate Crime (637A/22)
Request
- How many incidents of disability hate crime during 2020/21 and 2021/22 financial years were recorded as also being linked to other protected characteristics like race, gender, or sexual orientation?
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 (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
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). 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Unfortunately, with the exception of hate crime that is flagged as transgender hate crime, we do not possess a flag on our force systems to indicate if the hate crime is also linked to gender. We would need to conduct a manual search of all relevant records in order to locate and retrieve this information, this search would exceed the FOI time limit. As an alternative, we have broken down the data by gender as recorded on our systems (Female, Male and Unknown). This will give an indication of the volume of requested hate crime flags by gender.
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.