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Malicious Communications Act (696A/22)

Request

I am requesting information on police activity related to Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. Please can you provide a count per calendar year for your police force of:

  1. The number of arrests
  2. The number of charges
  3. The number of suspects released on bail or without charge

Which have been carried out under the act.

I would like this data from 2003-date, with breakdowns of offence types according to their CJS code, and ideally in .csv or Excel format.

I would also like the same figures, for the same period (that is, arrests, charges, and suspects released on bail or without charge) for 8/72 offences under the Malicious Communications Act 1988: Offence of sending letters etc. with intent to cause distress or anxiety, which have involved electronic communications. If your force does not record whether these offences involved electronic communications, please send the full data instead.

More detail on the offences concerned are here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/section/1/1991-02-01

Response

Please find attached our response and note that no results were returned for 2003.

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.

Attachments

696A_Attachment