Knife Crime and Social Media (1236/20)
Request
1) Please state the number of cases of violence against a person involving a “sharp or bladed instrument” that contain the following keywords
a) Tinder
b) Snapchat
c) Instagram
Please identify these by conducting a free text search of your crime database, and provide information for each of the last five financial years, and the current financial year to 22.01.20.
2) Please provide a breakdown of the specific type of offences recorded that included these keywords, for each individual keyword
3) Please provide an anonymised copy of free text report for each incident recorded.
Please note that I understand you were able to provide a full response to a previous similar request.
Response
Please find attached our response regarding questions 1 and 2. For question 3 please be advised that anonymised crime reports would not be made available for offences as the Modus Operandis (MO) contain personal information and details pertaining to any relevant investigation and therefore exemptions would apply, the amount of redaction necessary to remove exempt information and anonymise any remaining information subsequently renders the information useless.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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.