Dating Apps (646A/21)
Request
- The number of offence records listed in your crime database that contain the following keywords:
“Tinder”
b. “Grindr”
c. “Scruff”
d. “Hinge”
e. “Bumble”
f. “dating app”Please identify these by conducting a free text search of your crime database, and provide information for each of the last five financial years to 05/04/21.
2) A breakdown of the kind of offences recorded that included these keywords, for each individual keyword.
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).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. Please find attached (646A_21 attachment) our response. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
As previously indicated in clarifications, this data may not be wholly accurate, as “all” crimes with the keyword search in the modus operandi have been retrieved, therefore some of them may not be relevant or they may be repeated. For example, a crime may state “I was on my phone on tinder and bumble and I got robbed”. This would be a crime but not be related to the apps mentioned, though would have retrieved two results in the data search.
To separate this information out of the data search would exceed the costs, as an individual assessment of all 489 records retrieved would be in excess of 240 hours’ worth of work.
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.