Disability Hate Crimes (621A/22)
Request
- How many disability hate crimes have been recorded by your police force for the last two financial years – 2020/21 and 2021/22?
- How many disability hate crimes were committed by repeat offenders (of a previous disability hate crime) in the last two financial years- 2020/21 and 2021/22?
- How many disability hate crimes during each financial year (2020/21 and 2021/22) concerned acts of violence against a person?
- How many incidents of disability hate crime were recorded as taking place online in each financial year (2020/21 and 2021/22)?
- How many of the recorded disability hate crimes in each financial year (2020/21 and 2021/22) resulted in a CPS referral?
- How many of the recorded online disability hate crimes in each financial year (2020/21 and 2021/22) resulted in a CPS referral?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
With regard to question 2, there are no recording categories, fields or markers on our crime recording database to determine whether a crime has been committed by a repeat offender. To try to identify relevant information would require cross referencing the individuals in each disability hate crime against our current and legacy systems. As prosecution data is not routinely fed back into our systems and we do not have access to magistrates’ court data, we would subsequently need to cross reference these results against the PNC to determine whether they had a previous conviction. Similarly, with regard to questions 5 & 6 there are no central recording categories on our systems to enable us to identify the information requested, therefore, we would have to manually review the case details of each recorded hate crime to ascertain this information. To conduct these manual searches 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, 3 and 4. We can also provide outcome information for questions 5 and 6, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
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.
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: