Domestic Violence (610A/22)
Request
1) Please can you provide data pertaining to the number of 999 calls that were made to report or in relation to domestic violence for the calendar years:
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2021/2022 (to date)
2) Please can you provide data pertaining to the number of 999 calls relating to domestic violence across 2016 – 2022 respectively that were assigned:
a. Grade 1
b. Grade 2
c. Grade 3
d. Grade 4
Please also provide the time taken to attend for each part of the question.
3) Please can you provide a copy of your Call Grades and Deployment Policy or direct me to where I can find this.
4) Please can you tell me the total number of calls relating to domestic violence that were assigned grade 1, 2, 3 or 4 in comparison to or categorised by the area the incident was reported to have taken place in or the area officers were instructed to attend for the calendar years:
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2021/2022 (to date)
Grades 1 to 3 typically refer to an emergency response, a prompt response and a routine response. Please provide a description of the different grades (including expected response times to attend) used by the force if these differ.
5) Please provide the longest individual time taken to attend a grade 1, 2, 3 or 4 emergency call in 2021 for domestic violence, including what grade the call was assigned.
6) Please provide the total number of occasions that police did not attend:
a. Grade 1
b. Grade 2
c. Grade 3
d. Grade 4 emergencies last year (2021) relating to domestic violence.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, 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 (see attached file 610A_22_attachment.xlsx*). 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.
*Please note, due to a major change in West Midlands Police recording systems during 2020, data for this request has needed to be extracted from a number of different sources. However, Qualifiers were not accurately used on Oasis data due to only being able to apply one Qualifier/Final Classification (i.e. Domestic), on Control Works we can apply more than one Qualifier and Final Classification, thus creating less excessive logs and being more accurate and easier to audit. As a result, care should be taken when interpreting the attached data retrieved from different systems, in different years.
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 above 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
With regard to question 6, an electronic search of our systems shows more than 800 cases where officers appear not to have attended. However, a manual examination of the very first case shows that this search is unreliable (in summary – no time of arrival was documented but mention of officers speaking to both the suspect and witnesses). Therefore, in order to determine the total number of occasions that police did not attend, we would need to manually go into each of the 800+ cases (and a similar manual search to determine accurate results would also be required for question 5). Such a search though for these two questions alone would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12) and it should also be noted that the information attached with regard to questions 1 to 4 has already taken close to 18 hours to extract.
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: