Control and cohersive (77A/24)

1 February 2024 | Incident and Crime Statistics

Request

Response

Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).

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 enclosed). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s regulations for the remainder of the request.

Q1- The number of arrests made for coercive and controlling behaviour under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2023, broken down by calendar year.

Q2- The number of charges made for coercive and controlling behaviour under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2023, broken down by calendar year.

 

 

 

For question 1 & 2 above:

This data is the outcomes of arrest date data for the offence coercive and controlling behaviour.

Disposal Code	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	Total
Charged	25	34	25	18	44	6	152
Charged Elsewhere		1					1
No Further Action	78	140	189	356	540	161	1464
Pending		1	2	1	2	2	8
Pending Investigation		3		4	47	21	75
Police Bail			1	1	3	24	29
Postal Charge/Requisition	1	13	11	12	9		46
To charge confirmed			1		1		2
To Requisition					1		1
Grand Total	104	192	229	392	647	214	1778

 

Please note that after 2021 we changed our recording systems:

 

	2022	2023	2024	Total
Disposal Description
Refused Charge (NFA)	165	524	28	717
Bail to Police Station	93	451	30	574
Released Under Investigation	37	26	1	64
Charge	10	21		31
Adult Conditional Caution	2	6		8
Transferred – to Police Force	2	5		7
Not recorded		4	1	5
Transferred – to other lawful Detention Authority		1	1	2
Community Resolution		1		1
Grand Total	308	1038	61	1407

 

Q3- The number of prosecutions made for coercive and controlling behaviour under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2023, broken down by calendar year.

Q4- The number of convictions made for coercive and controlling behaviour under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2023, broken down by calendar year.

For questions 3 & 4 above, we do not hold this information in a central / retrievable format. When a defendant is sent to Court, it is the Court that decides if that person is prosecuted and convicted of an offence.  In each case their personal PNC record would be updated.  This information however, although available to the Police, would mean an individual search of 3185 personal records to evaluate the Court result.  Therefore, this exceeds the costs limitations for the purpose of the FOI Act (18 hours).

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 considered 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 considered 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.

As recommended as good practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office a version of this response may be published on the West Midlands Police website.

 

REASON FOR DECISION

 

Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).

3185 records x 5 mins per record = 265 hours

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.

 

 

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