Drink Spiking (16513/19)
Request
For each of the calendar years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 up to September 20, please state the number of reports your force received of drink spiking / drink lacing incidents.
For each reported crime please state the gender of the victim, the age of the victim, whether a charge was brought and if a charge was brought, whether there was a conviction.
If a defendant was charged/convicted with an alternative offence please state this too.
Clarification received:
I’d be happy for you to use the following:
- ‘drink-spike’
- drink-spiking’
- ‘drink’ and ‘spike’
- ‘drink’ and spiking’
Response
Please be advised that the specific information that you have requested is not available in an electronically searchable format. Please note that we are unable to provide conviction data as court information is not routinely fed back into our systems.
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, in order to assist, I can advise that we can provide relevant information relating to drink spiking that are recorded on our crimes database using a keyword search for the requested terms (‘drink-spike’, ‘drink-spiking’, ‘drink’, ‘spike’ and ‘spiking’). Please see attached (16513_Attachment) and be advised that we have manually reviewed the results in order to identify the records that do not relate to drink spiking (i.e. a spiked fence) and these have been removed.
These data should be interpreted with caution; the figures provided 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.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.