Crimes against Police Officers (509A/20)
Request
Can you provide the monthly figures of crimes against police officers from January 2020 to the date of this request. Can I ask that the request include ALL offences Including section 5, 4a, and 4 public order offences and assaults on police officers with and without injury.
Furthermore where an offence is recorded against an officer can I request the outcome of that criminal offence. eg. Charged, locally resolved, cautioned or no further action.
Similarly can I request the figures from January 2019 to the end of 2019.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format. Though there are specific offences against police officers (e.g. assault), to retrieve all offences against police officers would require manually reviewing every crime record to identify whether an officer was the victim. This is because the ‘victim occupation’ field on our crime recording system is not a mandatory field and is therefore not completed on all occasions.
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide information in relation to specific categories that are for offences against police officers. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
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.