Violence Against the Person – Victim 65+ (1032A/22)
Request
In relation to the years – April 2020-March 2021 and April 2021- March 2022. I require the following information,
- The number of violence against the person offences recorded by West Midlands Police Force involving victims in age categories 65-74 and 75+
- A breakdown of the gender of the victims identified above.
- A breakdown of the relationship of victim to principal suspect for each victim identified above.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, 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 file 1032A_22_attachment.pdf). 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
It is not possible to determine the relationship between the victim and defendant (question 3) without manually going into the records for each case. During the requested however, there were nearly 8,500 offences and to examine each of these would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that 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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: