Assaults on Football Referees (334A/23)
Request
My request relates to assaults on referees at grassroots and amateur (non-professional) football matches.
I would like to request the following information:
1) The number of crimes reported – or incidents to which police were called – to your force relating to physical or verbal abuse of a person described to be refereeing or otherwise officiating a football match from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022, inclusive;
2) A keyword search of police records to show how many times the words ‘referee’ and ‘linesman’ appear in crime reports from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide 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 as follows). 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.
2) A keyword search of police records to show how many times the words ‘referee’ and ‘linesman’ appear in crime reports from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022.
An electronic search of our systems was carried out for any crimes or incidents, recorded in 2022, that contained either the keyword ‘referee’ or ‘linesman’ in the summary field. This search returned 43 results. Each of these were then manually reviewed to identify whether any related to assaults on referees or linesmen at grassroots and amateur (non-professional) football matches. This review produced three relevant cases – all relating to referees.
REASON FOR DECISION
There are no markers on our crime or incident recording systems that allow us to easily identify those relating to assaults on referees/linesmen. Therefore, to determine the information for question 1, we would need to separately go into and manually read through, the case files and logs of every crime and incident recorded in 2022. However, this would mean a trawl of hundreds of thousands of records and such a search would take months if not years to complete, far exceeding 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 (18 hours x £25), 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:
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