Racist Incidents Football Stadiums (1410A/21)
Request
The number of reported racist incidents at the football stadiums of Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers in the years 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Response
Please be advised that 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.
This is because we do not have any markers or recording categories on our systems to identify whether a crime/incident is football related for the years 2016 – 2019. Therefore, in order to determine the information we would have to manually review every recorded hate crime. To conduct this manual search however would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide other relevant information held as this was retrieved during our initial research. This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
We have had a Dedicated Football Hate Crime Officer in post since 2021 and they have been able to advise as follows:
There is no data/reports for 2020 due to Covid – 19 and no supporters inside stadiums, but data for 2021 when supporters returned is below:
Aston Villa – 2
Wolves – 13
In addition to this, we have searched our Command and Control Closed Incidents between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2019 where the incident location is Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers and there is a marker for hate crime.
This has returned 7 relevant logs for Aston Villa and 2 relevant logs Wolverhampton Wanderers. Please note though that this would not have returned any results if they were not reported as racial, or if the callers address was put down as the incident location. It may also include repeat callers and/or calls about the same incident.
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