Retail theft (1508A/23)
Request
Q1.
a) How many instances of theft from retailers (shoplifting) were reported to your force between 1st January 2023 & 30th September 2023. Please break it down by month.
b) Of these reported incidences of theft from retailers (shoplifting) how many were attended by a police officer? Please break it down by month.
Q2.
a) How many instances of common assault, actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm/wounding against retail staff while they were at work were reported to your force between 1st January 2023 & 30th September 2023. Please break it down by month and type of offence.
b) Of these reported incidences of common assault, actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm/wounding against retail staff while they were at work, how many were attended by a police officer? Please break it down by month and type of offence.
Response
Please find enclosed our response.
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
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 your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s regulations for the remainder of the request.
1a) How many instances of theft from retailers (shoplifting) were reported to your force between 1st January 2023 & 30th September 2023. Please break it down by month.
Please note that these are recorded crimes. An incident is when a member of the public reports a matter to the police – this may not always be as is initially reported, and may not always result in a crime being created. Therefore, for accuracy we have provided crimes – these are crimes created from reported incidents of shop thefts.
The data in the table below is a result for a search of “shoplifting” which has two offence titles:
Attempted – theft from shops and stalls
Theft from shops and stalls
| Month Recorded | No. Records |
| Jan-2023 | 1,736 |
| Feb-2023 | 1,697 |
| Mar-2023 | 2,146 |
| Apr-2023 | 1,847 |
| May-2023 | 1,754 |
| Jun-2023 | 2,011 |
| Jul-2023 | 2,218 |
| Aug-2023 | 2,162 |
| Sep-2023 | 2,007 |
| Total | 17,578 |
1b) Of these reported incidences of theft from retailers (shoplifting) how many were attended by a police officer? Please break it down by month.
Exempt Section 12 Cost
In order to ascertain if an officer attended the reported incident is information that is not held in a format that is centrally located. Therefore, in order to locate the data, we would have to individually assess each of the 17,578 reported crimes above. This would exceed the time limit / cost for the purposes of the FOI Act.
2a) How many instances of common assault, actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm/wounding against retail staff while they were at work were reported to your force between 1st January 2023 & 30th September 2023. Please break it down by month and type of offence.
Exempt Section 12 Cost
An occupation is not a mandatory field. This means that data surrounding the employee status of a victim in a shop is not available in many cases. Therefore, as in Question 1B, we would have to individually access 17,758 crimes in order to locate any data that may or may not have been recorded in the modus operandi field.
This would exceed the time limit / cost for the purposes of the FOI Act.
2b) Of these reported incidences of common assault, actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm/wounding against retail staff while they were at work, how many were attended by a police officer? Please break it down by month and type of offence.
As we are unable to locate the data in question 1A – we are unable to locate this information.
In order to ascertain if an officer attended the reported incident is information that is not held in format that is centrally located. Therefore, in order to locate the data, we would have to individually assess each of the 17,578 reported crimes above. This would exceed the time limit / cost for the purposes of the FOI Act.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently, statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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 considered 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 considered 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.
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