Sex Offenders Register (233A/22)
Request
- Broken down into local policing unit areas, can you confirm how many people (broken down into men and women) are on the Sex Offenders’ Register across the West Midlands right now? How does this compare to the number on the same date (or whatever comparable date is possible to use) in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017?
1a: How many breaches of the Sex Offenders’ Register have been recorded in 2017-18; 20218-19; 2019-20; 2020-21; 2021-22.
- Broken down into local policing unit areas, can you confirm how many people (broken down into men and women) are subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order across the West Midlands?
2a: How many breaches of SHPOs have been recorded in 2017-18; 20218-19; 2019-20; 2020-21; 2021-22.
- Broken down into local policing unit areas, can you confirm how many people (broken down into men and women) are subject to a Sexual Risk Order across the West Midlands?
3a: How many breaches of SROs have been recorded in 2017-18; 20218-19; 2019-20; 2020-21; 2021-22.
- How many staff are in the force’s public protection unit responsible for overseeing sexual offenders and the SHRO and SRO registers, now, and compared to 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
- What is the force’s policy on monitoring, supervising and supporting sex offenders?
- Does the force have any statement or qualifying comments to add about its monitoring, supervision and support for sex offenders and anyone concerned about the effectiveness of monitoring processes.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In relation to RSOs broken down by neighbourhood policing unit and men and women, this information is not held in a centrally collated format. This means that in order to identify this information we would have to manually review each individual record created in each of the requested years. With regard to question 4, we are unable to provide a comparison of roles with previous years or those exclusively responsible for SHRO and SRO registers due to staff, line management and organisational structure changes. There will be officers across the Force in various departments that have involvement in this management. Therefore, to conduct a manual search of our systems and cross referencing of role profiles to answer these questions 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.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide information for the remainder of your request. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: