Primark Crimes (796A/23)
Request
1) Please state for the financial years a) 2021/22 and b) 2022/23 how many of the following crimes were alleged to have occurred and were recorded by your force as having happened in Primark
Assault offences to include all assault offences
5D – Assault with intent to cause serious harm
8N – Assault with injury
8P – Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury
105A – Assault without injury
105B – Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury
2) Please specify how many of the incidents recorded in question 1 were a) customers assaulting Primark staff as distinct from b) assaults that occurred between customers without any staff members falling victim.
NOTE: I am only interested in assaults which occurred within Primark store premises. Please exclude incidents where the crime happened “down the road from” or “outside” Primark, etc.
In addition, please provide me with a verbatim copy of the “investigation summary field” and/or the modus operandi (MO) for the ten most recent cases.
Response
We can confirm that relevant information is held by West Midlands Police. However, while the majority of the information is attached to this email, I am not required to release all of the information requested. Please find attached the redacted information.
REASONS FOR DECISION
The redacted information is exempt by virtue of the following exemptions:
Section 30(1) – Investigations and proceedings
Section 40(2) – Personal information
These exemptions and explanatory notes are shown here:
In line with the above, I am required to complete a Prejudice Test/Public Interest Test (PIT) on disclosure. Please find this PIT attached.
Section 40(2) allows for personal data to be withheld where release would breach the third party’s data protection rights. It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.
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.