Drink Spiking (1551A/21)
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from your force.
Please tell me:
- The total number of incidents of “drink spiking” reported to your force in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
- The total number of incidents of “spiked by injection / body spiking”.
- Of these incidents, how many resulted in arrests and how many resulted in successful prosecutions?
- Can you provide any more detail surrounding the nature of these incidents?
Please can I have the information from 1st January 2018 to 28th October 2021 (or the most recent incident). I ask for the information to be broken down into years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).
CLARIFICATION
I think searching for the below codes would work the best:
088/05 (Administering a substance with intent), 005/24 (Use of noxious substances of things to cause harm and intimidate) and 005/05 10 (Administering drug with intent to commit indictable offence)
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 (see attached). 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). We cannot provide arrest data after April 2021, this is due to a change in our recording systems and would require a manual search in order to locate and retrieve this information, such search would exceed the FOI time limit.
Please note, this data has been retrieved as a result of a current force operation in relation to drink spiking / injection and by use of specific keywords. The figures include reports where someone ‘believes’ they have been a victim of drink spiking / injection.
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.