Dangerous Dogs (1152A/23)
Request
- The number of dangerous dogs out of control seized under S3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act by the force, by year, since 2018.
- The number of arrests under the Dangerous Dogs Act performed by the force, by year, since 2018.
- For H1 2023 (start January to end June), could you please provide a breakdown of the number of dogs seized under S3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act by the force by breed.
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 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 – 1152A_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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Regarding question 3, it is not possible to determine the breeds of only those dogs that were seized, without manually reviewing the records of every incident this year where our officers have ‘encountered’ a dog. This however would involve a trawl of the records from 268 encounters and such a search 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.
However, as an alternative response to this question, we have instead provided the breeds of all of those 268 encounters. It is important to note though that not all encounters result in a seizure, but without undertaking the manual review described above we are unable to separate out the breeds of those seized from the encounters.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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 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 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.