Sexual Orientation Hate Crime (437A/23)
Request
I would like to request the following for the years 2013 to 2023 or as many of those years as are available for the following:
- Hate crimes reported as being perceived to have been based on the protected characteristic of sexual orientation, specifically towards lesbians.
- Hate crimes reported as being perceived to have been based on the protected characteristic of sexual orientation, specifically towards gay men.
- Hate crimes reported as being perceived to have been based on the protected characteristic of sexual orientation, specifically towards bisexual men.
- Hate crimes reported as being perceived to have been based on the protected characteristic of sexual orientation, specifically towards bisexual women.
- Hate crimes reported as being perceived to have been based on the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.
- I would additionally like to know how many of these reports led to an arrest, and additionally how many led to a conviction.
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).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied some information, relative to questions 1, 2, 3 , 4 and 5 your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 437A_23_attachment and also note that data for 2013 is not available). 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
Questions 1 to 4 – It is not a mandatory requirement to record the sexual orientation of a victim on our crime system. Therefore, in order to try and determine whether a sexual orientation hate crime was against an individual identifying as either Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual we would need to manually go into the case files of each offence and read through them. This however would involve a manual trawl of more than 8,000 records and such a search, even at a minimum of five minutes per record, would take more than 600 hours to complete and far exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Additionally, with regard to question 6, our custody system is not linked to our crime recording system and also court data are not fed back into our crime system. Therefore in order to determine the number of arrests and convictions, we would need to manually cross reference each crime with our custody system and the Police National Computer (PNC). It is difficult to provide an exact estimate that each search would take, but it would certainly take much longer than the minimum five minutes that the search for questions 1 to 4 would take and therefore be a huge undertaking that would once again, far 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:
https://www.college.police.uk/app/information-management/freedom-information#fees-and-charges