Crimes Involving Weddings/Funerals (586A/21)
Request
For each calendar year 2018, 2019 and 2020 and the period 1st January 2021 to 8th April 2021, please could you tell me:
1) The number of reported crimes which mentioned “wedding” in the MO field of the crime report
2) A brief summary of each reported crime listed in your answer to question 1 and the outcome (e.g. arrest made, no further action, etc)
3) The number of reported crimes which mentioned “funeral” in the MO field of the crime report
4) A brief summary of each reported crime listed in your answer to question 3 and the outcome (e.g. arrest made, no further action, etc)
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).
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 information requested for questions 1 & 3 broken down by offence title and outcome, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Therefore, please see attached document and also note the following:
- Data is currently only available up until 7th April 2021 due to a force-wide change in recording systems that took place on 8th
- While we have conducted a search for the specified keywords ‘wedding’ and ‘funeral’, an initial inspection of the data revealed they do not all relate to incidents that took place at weddings/funerals and instead pertain to a wide range of circumstances e.g. theft of wedding rings etc.
Therefore, the figures provided above 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.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
REASON FOR DECISION
In order to answer questions 2 & 4, we would have to manually read and then summarise each recorded crime. To do this, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that 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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: