Non-Crime Hate Incidents (269A/21)
Request
1) How many non-crime hate incidents has your force recorded against a person 16-years-old and under from 2014 to 2019 inclusive?
Just to clarify, I am looking for the number of non-crime hate incidents that have been recorded against a person 16-years-old and under who is the alleged perpetrator of the incident, not the victim.
2) What was the total number of non-crime hate incidents your force recorded in 2020?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to part of your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see answer to question 2 as follows). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
2. During the period 01 January 2020 to 31 December 2020, we recorded 324 hate non-crime incidents.
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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Non-crime hate incidents do not have a defendant, person responsible or suspect, etc. attached to them on our central recording system. Therefore in order to try and determine the requested information for question 1, if it is even known or recorded (for example some incidents may involve an unknown alleged perpetrator), we would need to manually examine all non-crime hate incidents recorded from 2014 to 2019. During this period however, we recorded approximately 3,500 of these incidents and to review each of these would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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