Homophobic Attacks (21574/19)
Request
1. How many homophobic attacks have there been in 2017, 2018, and 2019?
2. What was the nature of the attack?
3. Where was the attack?
4. Was the person prosecuted?
5. Where any of the attacks on Drag Queens – men in drag.
6. Any information you have on Drag Queens and hate crimes/ attacks.
Response
Please be advised that all of the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. We are unable to provide prosecution data for question 4 because court information is not routinely fed back into our systems. Therefore, I have instead provided the number of charges made. With regard to questions 5 and 6, we do not have a marker or recording category on our systems to denote victims of this type; to try to ascertain whether this information is recorded anywhere within the case file would require a manual review of each recorded homophobic offence for the requested time period (1,579 records) which would exceed the appropriate limit under FOIA.
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 accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the information requested for questions 1-4. As advised above, question 4 will be for the number of charges made. Please see attached document (21574_Attachment).
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: