Drink Spiking (152A/23)
Request
Please can you provide the following information for the calendar years 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022:
- The number of spiking by injection crimes logged by the force in each year
- Of these, what was the gender breakdown of victims
- How many had a type 1 outcome (“Charge / Summons”)
- How many had a type 14 outcome (“Evidential difficulties: suspect not identified; victim does not support further action”)
- How many had a type 15 outcome (Evidential difficulties: suspect identified; victim supports action”)
- How many had a type 16 outcome (“Evidential difficulties: suspect identified; victim does not support further action”)
- How many have not yet been assigned an outcome.
- The number of drink spiking crimes logged by the force in each year
- Of these, what was the gender breakdown of victims
- How many had a type 1 outcome (“Charge / Summons”)
- How many had a type 14 outcome (“Evidential difficulties: suspect not identified; victim does not support further action”)
- How many had a type 15 outcome (Evidential difficulties: suspect identified; victim supports action”)
- How many had a type 16 outcome (“Evidential difficulties: suspect identified; victim does not support further action”)
- How many have not yet been assigned an outcome.
Please provide the requested information in Excel or CSV format.
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 of 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, that we have been able to extract from our systems within the time/cost limitations of the Act (see attached document ‘152A_Attachment’).
With regard to the attached data, it is important to note that the data has been retrieved using a mix of offence types and keyword searches (detailed within the attachment) and as a result some offences of this nature may not have been captured by this search, as they may not have contained any of the specified keywords in the summary notes. In addition, I note you have asked for separate data relating to spiking by injections and drink spiking, therefore I have broken the data tables down by the keywords to help differentiate the 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
There are no specifically titled offences that relate solely to ‘drink spiking’ and/or ‘spiking by injection’ and we do not have any markers on our recording system that would allow us to easily identify reports of this nature. Therefore, to accurately determine the number of these reports, we would need to conduct a manual examination of crime records. This however would require a trawl of thousands of records and such a search would far 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.