Knife Crime (822A/20)
Request
1) The number of knife crime incidents investigated (including attacks and possessions) in September 2020 within the force area, presented by a) date, b) age of offender and c) location of incident, d) whether arrests made, e) whether charges made
2) The WMP response time to each of these knife crime incidents
3) Whether CCTV was a) available, b) requested, c) gained for the investigation into these knife incidents
4) If CCTV was available and requested into each incident but not gained, the reason why this was so
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. To identify and retrieve the information for questions 2 – 4 would require manually reviewing each individual crime record/report as this information is not separately or centrally collated. 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 the information requested for question 1. Please find this information attached. In addition, please note that our crimes database is not linked to our arrests database, therefore, we are unable to provide any relevant arrest data.
These data should be interpreted with caution; the figures provided 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.