Convenience Store Robberies (421A/24)
Request
I am seeking data on the types of weapons used during robberies in convenience stores. I believe there is a strong public interest for this information to be published due to the safety risk posed to both businesses and members of the public.
Please can you supply the following information:
1) The number of businesses who were victims of reported robberies for the periods of 1 January 2022 – 31 December 2022 and 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2023.
2) The key search terms I am seeking in relation to the type of business are; convenience store, corner shop, grocery store, supermarket, newsagent, symbol group, tobacconist, off licence and independent retailer.
The key search terms I am seeking in relation to the weapon used are guns, knives, needles, unarmed and blunt weapons (baseball bats, clubs, etc).
3) Could you also provide the name the businesses traded under and their address.
4) Whether the robber was arrested and their conviction/sentence.
Ideally, I would like these figures broken down month-on-month.
Response
Please find attached our response.
West Midlands Police has a dedicated Business Crime Co-ordinator working within our Design Out Crime Team, whose role it is to work closely with local businesses and convenience stores to help prevent crime and support retailers and their staff.
This includes advising retailers around store design and other recommendations which make it harder to for crimes to be carried out, as well as producing high quality evidence to support prosecutions when crimes occur. Working in partnership is essential to reducing crime retail crime.
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.