Knife Crime (793A/22)
Request
- How many people have been arrested for knife crime for the following years:
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
2. How many people have been charged through a knife crime for the following years:
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
3. How many victims of knife crime has been recorded in your region for the years:
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
4. How many victims under the age of 16 have been recorded by your force for the years:
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
5. Can you specify how many minors under the age of 16 have been arrested for knife crime? Can you give a break down by age and sex?
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
6. Can you specify how many minors under the age of 16 have been charged for knife crime for the years:
May 2019- May 2020
May 2020- May 2021
May 2021 – May 2022
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In relation to questions 1 and 5, we are unable to identify arrests in relation to knife crime because we do not have any recording categories or markers to denote this for custody records. References to the involvement of a knife would be contained within the case file itself, therefore in order to determine this we would have to manually review each individual custody record for the requested time period. 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.
However, under 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, 2, 6 and 7 as this was retrieved during our initial research. With regard to questions 1 and 5, to assist we have instead provided information for offenders of recorded crime with a knife crime marker. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
Please also note, victim and offender age is calculated from the date of birth input onto our systems and its accuracy is therefore reliant on the correct date being entered. In order to confirm the accuracy of every age though, we would need to manually go into each case. Such a search however would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). Data has therefore been provided as recorded, but 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.