Violence Against the Person and Sexual Crimes(773A/20)
Request
I am writing to request the following dataset as an Excel spreadsheet showing: rows showing the number of Violence Against the Person and Sexual Crimes (both sub-categorised by the Home Office Counting Rules reference, as opposed to the code number) against the columns showing the racial classification of those arrested.
Would you please be able to show these figures in full for 2018 and a second table for 2019 please?
We clarified with you on 21/9/2020:
Your request is very broad and it is not clear which documents or information would satisfy your query. Therefore it would be helpful if you could be more specific.
You responded on 2/10/2020:
Ideally I would like a table which would emulate the following, an example in the row below for all sexual and violent crimes please:
| Reported Month Year | Crime Group | OffenceDescription | Volume of Crime | Arrested Persons – Race Not Known |
Arrested Persons – 1. White – North European or 2. White – South European |
Arrested Persons – 3. Black |
Arrested Persons – 4. Asian |
Arrested Persons – 5. Chinese, Japanese, SE Asian |
Arrested Persons – 6. Arabic or North African |
| Mar-2019 | Violence Against The Person | Assault occasioning actual bodily harm (Section 47) |
Response
Please find attached (773A_20 attachment) our response. We have provided the data on an excel spreadsheet due to the amount of data involved. We have had to separate the year into two sections:
Volume of crime and then another table for the ethnicity of those arrested. There are tabs for easy explanation.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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.
As recommended as good practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office a version of this response may be published on the West Midlands Police website.