Coronavirus Fines (172A/20)
Request
1) Individual police forces in England have been reporting the number of fines they have issued for breaches of the government’s public health regulations to the NPCC. You can see that data here. To date, the NPCC has published data on the number of fines issued for the period 27 March to 13 April, broken down by individual force and totalled for ethnicity. Please could you provide me with the ethnic breakdown of fines issued by your force for the period 27 March to 13 April. I would expect the categories to include, but not be limited to, White, Black, Asian, Mixed/Mixed Race. There may also be a category for people who did not self-identify their ethnicity.
2) I understand the NPCC has asked forces for more recent data. Please could you also provide me with the ethnic breakdown of fines issued for the period 13 April to 11 May. I would expect the categories to include, but not be limited to, White, Black, Asian, Mixed/Mixed Race. There may also be a category for people who did not self-identify their ethnicity.
Apologies, I wish to clarify a point in my FoI. The NPCC will publish data on the fines this week or next. To be clear, this will not include the ethnicity breakdown of fines by force, hence why I am asking your force for it.
Response
Please find attached our response.
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.