Drinking Spiking (440A/24)
Request
Can you please provide details of reports of ‘’Spiking’ of drinks in your police area for 2021, 2022 and 2023?
Can you break this down by location, type of venue, bar/nightclub, by sex of complainant and by date – week or month.
Can you please let me know if any of this request exceeds the cost limit for an FoI and if so how I could amend the request so not to exceed that limit as soon as possible.
To be clear I am referring to the offence of spiking to referred to in this Government factsheet.
Response
Please find attached our response. Please note: we have performed a search for the offences included in the link provided and narrowed it down by performing a keyword search for words: spike, spiked, spiking. This might however include some offences that mention the keywords but were not in fact offences of spiking (for example ‘not spiked’).
Please be aware for any future requests we require specific search parameters in order that we can allocate the request to the most appropriate department/s to research and retrieve information requested. The authority is not obliged to cross-reference other information, documents, or previous disclosures etc in order to try and establish the specific information that an applicant requires. The FOI Unit cannot phrase your questions for you, and our analysts are not able to retrieve data without specific search parameters.
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 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.