Violence Against the Person (404A/22)
Request
A) How many crimes were recorded under the offence group, violence against the person
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020,2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22
B) how many crimes recorded within the offence group: violence against the person where linked to steroid abuse
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020, 2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22.
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. This is because we do not have a recording category, field or marker on our systems to denote whether steroids were involved in a crime. Therefore, to identify relevant information for this question we would have to manually review each individual crime record under the offence group of violence against the person. Due to the large number of records for this, conducting a manual search 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 the information requested for question A), as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this below.
| Year | Number |
| 2019-20 | 84,879 |
| 2020-21 | 117,232 |
| 2021-22 | 146,857 |
| Total | 348,968 |
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:
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.
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