Incidents at Co-op Stores (915A/23)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act I am kindly requesting the following information:
‘in 2020 (full year), 2021(full year), 2022 (full year) and 2023 (to March):
(a) how many incidents at a Co-op* store have been reported to the West Midlands Police?;
(b) how many times have the West Midlands Police attended in person to an incident reported to them at a Co-op* store?; and
(c) how many people have been charged to court having committed an offence at a Co-op* store?
* Co-op, Coop, Co-op Group, Co-operative, Co-operative Group’
Response
For the period 2020 – 2021 (up to March) – this data has already been disclosed and published on our website at the following link: https://foi.west-midlands.police.uk/incidents-at-co-op-539a-21/
For the period 2021 (from March) – 2023 (up to March) – we have conducted a keyword search as requested, however it is important to note that keyword searches are prone to error as they are designed to retrieve any information within the field that contains the specified words. With this in mind, we have conducted a dip sample of the results and can see that not all of these records relate specifically to ‘co-op’ stores – it appears that some relate to addresses that have the word ‘co-op’ within them and some relate to addresses that have a ‘co-op’ near them but the officer appears to have input this within the address details.
Please also note that the data for questions (a) and (b) have been extracted from our incident database and the data for question (c) has been extracted from our crime database. Our crime and incident databases are separate recording systems and they record different information, therefore, the data provided for (a) and (b) will not correlate with the data provided for (c).
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.