Domestic Abuse & Violent Crime Incidents (342A/23)
Request
Per calendar year from when the force was able to flag incidents reported to police control rooms as relating to domestic abuse up to and including 2022, please share the following information:
Q1. How many incidents were reported to police control rooms?
Q2. How many incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse
Q3. How many incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse where the alleged victim is a member of the armed forces? Please provide a breakdown by gender. Please also share how many of these incidents the military was informed of.
Q4. How many incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse where the alleged perpetrator is a member of the armed forces? Please provide a breakdown by gender. Please also share how many of these incidents the military was informed of.
Q5. How many violent crime incidents were reported to police control rooms?
Q6. How many violent crime incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse?
Q7. How many violent crime incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse where the alleged victim is a member of the armed forces? Please provide a breakdown by gender. Please also share how many of these incidents the military was informed of.
Q8. How many violent crime incidents reported to police control rooms were flagged as domestic abuse where the alleged perpetrator is a member of the armed forces? Please provide a breakdown by gender. Please also share how many of these incidents the military was informed of.
In terms of time frame requested, if, for example, the force was able to flag these incidents from June 2016, I would like to receive data for calendar years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit of 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 342A_23_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.
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. Therefore, 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 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
With regard to questions 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8, although we have a marker on our incident recording system that allows us to easily identify reports of domestic abuse, the only way to determine the further detail being requested (member of military etc.), would be to manually go into the records of each of these incidents and even then, some/all of this information may not be recorded.
Regardless however, this would mean a trawl of more than 62,000 incident logs and such a search, even at a bare minimum of five minutes per case, would take over 5,000 hours to complete, far exceeding the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Regarding question 5, this would be an even bigger task as there is no ‘violent crime’ marker on our incident recording system. Therefore, we would need to manually examine every single incident, of which there are over two million!
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: