Out of Court Disposals (760A/20)
Request
This is a freedom of information request relating to out of court disposals.
Can you please provide the total number of out of court disposals for the first six months of 2020, as well as a monthly breakdown of the total number of out of court disposals in that period? Can you please advise the total number of charges/summonses for the same period?
Can you please provide the total number of out of court disposals for the first six months of the previous five years, to allow an accurate comparison?
In relation to the 2020 out of court disposals, can you please provide a breakdown of which of the following disposals were used:
a. community resolution
b. simple caution
c. conditional caution
d. PND
e. any other out of court disposal
Finally, can you please provide a summary of the crime type that each out of court disposal related to in the first six months of 2020.
Response
Please find attached (760A_20_attachment.pdf).
In addition to the attached information, West Midlands Police can neither confirm nor deny that it holds any other information relevant to this request as the duty in Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply by virtue of the following exemptions:
Section 24(2) National security
Section 31(3) Law enforcement
These exemptions and explanatory notes are shown here:
Sections 24 and 31 are prejudice based qualified exemptions and there is a requirement to articulate the harm that would be caused in confirming or denying that any further information is held, as well as carrying out a public interest test (PIT). Please find this PIT attached (760A_20_PIT.pdf).
No inference can be taken from this refusal that any further information relevant to your request does or does not exist.
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.