Acid Attacks (836A/20)
Request
1) I would like to know how many ‘corrosive attacks against the person’ (also known as ‘acid attacks’ or ‘corrosive fluid offences’) were reported to the West Midlands Police Service during the period 2010-2020?
2) In each instance, what was the sex, age and ethnicity of the suspects and the victims and how many were determined to be gang-related?
Response
Please find attached our response. In addition, please note that whether something is gang related is not held in a readily retrievable format, therefore to determine this information would require manually reviewing each crime record. Records may be annotated with a gang related marker, but this is not a mandatory recording field so cannot be relied upon. However, a search has been conducted for the gang related marker but no results were found.
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.