Female Victims of Knife Crime (1592A/23)
Request
I would like to see the data you have for the number of women injured through knife crime, killed by knife crime, or threatened with knife crime between January 2017 – December 2022.
If possible, it would be helpful to know if the victim was a) known to the perpetrator b) romantically involved with them.
If you would be able to provide this data with the month, year, number of female victims and the type of knife crime in the area policed by West Midlands Police.
And, if possible, the number of victims for the month and year that were known to the perpetrator or romantically involved with them.
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 1592A_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
It is not possible to determine from our crime systems whether a victim of a knife crime offence was known to, or romantically involved with the perpetrator, without going into and reading through the case files of the offence. However, a search such as this would require a minimum of five minutes per case and during the requested period there were an overall average of 1,000 offences recorded annually. Therefore, for one year alone the search would take over 80 hours, and for the whole six-year period, more than 500 hours.
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