Spiking Incidents (588A/22)
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information regarding spiking figures. I would like the information given by year with individual figures, please.
- The total number of complaints reported to the authority of people’s drinks being drugged, spiked or laced in the last five years (2018-2022).
- The action taken against reports to the authority of people’s drinks being drugged, spiked or laced in the last five years (2018-2022).
- The action taken against reports to the authority of people being spiked by other means including needle spiking in the last five years (2018-2022).
- How many of the total complaints of spiking were officially labelled as spiking by the authority in the last five years (2018-2022).
- How many of the total complaints of spiking resulted in convictions in the last five years (2018-2022).
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. We do not have a central recording category that identifies drugged, spiked or laced drinks Each log would need to be located and retrieved and manually read to see if the summary contained / mentioned drinks.
Therefore, 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, In accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide information in relation to recent events and as a result of a current force operation we have been able to retrieve relevant information using a bespoke search criteria. Please see this attached.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: