Crimes at Betting Shops (18543/19)
Request
1. The number of occasions your police force was called to attend a betting shop in connection with a report of a crime within the premises. (Betting shop names if required are: William Hill, Paddy Power, Coral, Ladbrokes, Betfred, Stan James, Totesport, Jennings Bet, Boylesports, Quicksilver)
Please provide details for the above for 2018; for January 1 2019 to March 31 2019; and for April 1 2019 to date.
For each of the above incidents, please include:
a) date of the incident
b) location of the incident
c) summary of the incident
d) gender and ages of any individual(s) arrested.
e) the outcome (that is any charge, caution or no further action)
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format. We are unable to definitely state whether a crime occurred within the premises of a betting shop without reviewing each individual case. Our crimes database has a location marker of ‘betting office’, however, a crime may not necessarily have occurred on the betting office premises; the betting office may only be the nearest identifiable landmark and so has been entered onto the crime report. Please also note that we are unable to provide arrest data because our crimes database is not linked to our arrests database.
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.
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 the number of crimes recorded using the primary location description of ‘betting office’, broken down by month/year, Neighbourhood Policing Unit (NPU), offence title, defendant gender/age and outcome. Please see attached document (18543_Attachment).
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.