Drink Spiking (1557A/21)
Request
- The number of incidents involving drink spiking reported from October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2021. Please provide this information based on word searches of the MO text, which contain one (or more) of the following combinations of words:
- “spik” AND “drink”
- “spik” AND “lace”
- “spik” AND “laced”
- “spik” AND “lacing”
- “spik” AND “needle”
(please use “spik” and not “spike” to capture “spike”, “spiked”, or “spiking”)
- For each reported incident, please state the victim’s gender i.e. male, female or unknown.
- Please state the outcome of the incident. Please use the outcome categories used on the Home Office police recorded crime and outcomes open data:
- Charged/Summonsed
- Diversionary, educational or intervention activity, resulting from the crime report, has been undertaken and it is not in the public interest to take any further action.
- Evidential difficulties (suspect identified; victim supports action)
- Evidential difficulties (victim does not support action)
- Further investigation to support formal action not in the public interest – police decision
- Investigation complete – no suspect identified
- Not yet assigned an outcome
- Out-of-court (formal)
- Out-of-court (informal)
- Prosecution prevented or not in the public interest
- Responsibility for further investigation transferred to another body
- Taken into consideration
Please break down the above information by 12-month periods i.e. October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2017, October 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018 etc., up to and including October 1, 2020 to September 30, 2021.
Response
Please find attached our response.
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.