Transgender Hate Crime (665A/23)
Request
As a year-on-year breakdown of crimes recorded per month:
1) How many hate crimes have been recorded by police towards a Trans person/people between April 18th 2018 to now?
2) What types of offence were these – e.g. public order offences, violence against the person without injury, criminal damage and arson, violence against a person with injury, stalking and harassment.
3) Of those where there was violence with an injury, what were the outcomes of this? E.g the victim was hospitalised/died/ sustained life-changing injuries.
4) What were the outcomes of the offences? (Arrested, charged, sentenced).
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all 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 information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 665A_23_attachment.pdf). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
REASON FOR DECISION
Regarding question 3 (“…victim was hospitalised/died/ sustained life-changing injuries”). It is not possible to determine this information from our crimes database. Instead it would require us having to manually go into and review the records of each case/liaise with the officer in charge at the time and such a search would 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 can be found here:
https://www.college.police.uk/app/information-management/freedom-information#fees-and-charges