Non crime incidents (1348A/22)
Request
Q1: Could you please provide the number of non-crime incidents recorded from January 1 2017?
Q2: Could the data be broken down by year and what specifically the non-crime incident was, with as much specific detail as possible.
Q3: Could it also include whether the individual’s name was recorded? I understand the guidance around what information is recorded has changed since July.
Q4: Please add details of the police interactions (this is terminology used by College of Policing) and the results of those actions.
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 (1348A 22 attachment). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s regulations for the remainder of the request.
For Question 1 and Question 2 please see attachment 1348A 22 which provides the annual non-crime figures and the outcome of those reports, ie how the incident was closed off.
For Question 3 and Question 4 these questions would exceed the time limitations for the purposes of the freedom of information act as all incidents would need to be manually assessed in order to see if an individual’s details were recorded and what the police interaction – if any – was recorded.
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 considered 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 considered 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.