Hate Crime (290A/20)
Request
- The total number of reported hate-crimes in your Constabulary each year from January 1st 2000 to June 1st 2020?
- From those cases above, how many resulted in a conviction?
- Out of these hate-crimes, do you have statistics on how many were incidents of racism? If so, can this figure be included for each month?
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 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 290A_20_attachment.pdf). 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
Hate crime data is not identifiable from our central recording systems prior to April 2002. Therefore in order to determine the requested information for questions 1 and 3 prior to this time, we would need to conduct a manual review of all offences recorded between 01 January 2000 and 31 March 2002. Such a search however would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Additionally, court data are not fed back into our central crime recording systems, therefore in order to determine the number of convictions for question 2, we would need to manually review all cases that resulted in a Charge. Such a search would also exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). However, in order to assist, I have instead provided a breakdown of all cases with an outcome of a Charge or Summons (see attached 290A_20_attachment.pdf).
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: