Hate Crime (281A/21)
Request
1a) The number of hate crime reports received by your police force for the time period January 2011 to January 2021 broken down by month. If you hold the data in another form such as quarterly, please provide that. If you do not hold data for January 2021, please provide data up to the latest available time period.
1b) Please provide this monthly (or quarterly or equivalent) data broken down by type of hate crime such as racially aggravated/religious/transgender etc.
(i) Please also break it down by how it was reported e.g. 999, 101, front counter, officer on the street, third party, online reporting
(ii) and who reported it e.g. police officer, hate crime reporting centre, member of the public. It is my understanding that the data should be held in a retrievable format for the first two of these requests; if you do not hold retrievable data for the third request (who reported it) and to provide that would trigger the cost exemption, please ignore this third request.
1c) Please also provide this monthly (or quarterly or equivalent) data broken down by outcome. At the absolute minimum, please provide this broken down by i) reports that did not make it past the crime bureau stage, ii) reports filed pending further information, iii) reports that led to arrest, iv) reports that led to charge. I would expect to received more detailed data however, with an outcome listed for every report.
2) Please provide us with the criteria the crime bureau (or similar) uses to determine whether a hate crime report should be allocated to an officer (ie the first step in beginning an investigation). If this takes the form of a document or flow chart or any other file, please provide the original material. If to do so is operationally sensitive, please provide a general overview of the criteria used and explain the reasons for doing so.
3) Please provide the number of hate crime reports that resulted in referral to the CPS. Again, please break this down by time period, type, how it was reported, and who reported it, assuming that all these things can be fulfilled without triggering the cost exemption. If you do not hold this data and to retrieve it would trigger the cost exemption, please disregard this request.
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. This is because there are no central recording categories on our systems to enable us to identify the information requested for questions 1b (ii) and 3). Therefore, we would have to manually review the case details of each recorded hate crime to ascertain this information. Such a search, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide recorded crime information for the remainder of your request, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached documents.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.