Spiking (1717A/22)
Request
- How many women and men have reported that they have had their drinks spiked or have been spiked by needle injection between January 1st, 2021, to 30th November 2022?
- Please can you specify the ages of these men and women who have reported that they have had their drinks spiked or have been spiked by needle injection between the dates listed above.
- Can you please specify the location for where these spiking’s have been reported?
- Out of these men and women who reported they were spiked; do you have any evidence of this, i.e., toxicology reports to show that they were spiked. If you do, please can you provide the evidence to show this.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied what I believe is the closest information, relative to your request, we can extract from our systems within the time/cost limitations of the Act (see attached 1717A_22_attachment.pdf).
It is important to note though that the supplied data were retrieved using a mix of offence types and keyword searches and as a result, may not be as accurate as a search using specific offence titles were they available to us. I have dip sampled a dozen of these incidents though and they all related to reports of drink or needle spiking. Therefore, I am fairly confident that the majority (if not all) of the results returned by the search will be relevant to your request. However, it’s also likely that some offences of this nature will not have been captured as they will not have contained any of the keywords in the summary notes.
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.
REASON FOR DECISION
There is no specifically titled offence of ‘drink spiking’ or ‘needle spiking’ and we do not have a marker on our incident or crime recording systems that allows us to easily identify reports of this nature. Therefore, to accurately determine the number of women and men who reported having their drinks spiked or spiked by needle injection, we would need to manually review all incident logs. This, however, would necessitate a trawl of thousands of records and such a search would far exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here.