FOI 282791
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 282791
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 4th October 2023. Please find below the response to your request:
Historically I have been successful in receiving a return from police forces on this particular subject - Foreign National Crimes. Therefore once again under the Freedom of information act 2000 - I would like to request the following information:
Q, How many alleged offences have been recorded as crimes committed by foreign nationals in your force area 2022/23?
Q, If possible could you provide a breakdown of these crimes and the countries these individuals are from?
Q, How many alleged offences have been recorded as crimes committed by foreign nationals in your force area 2021/22?
Q, If possible could you provide a breakdown of these crimes and the countries these individuals are from?
Q, How many alleged offences have been recorded as crimes committed by foreign nationals in your force area 2020/21?
Q, If possible could you provide a breakdown of these crimes and the countries these individuals are from?
Reply
West Mercia Police holds the information requested.
Caveat: In line with national police data returns, the report is based on crime input date. This means that an offence that has occurred some months or years previously but reported recently, will be counted against the year/month in which it was reported.
Not all crimes have a suspect linked, and some may have multiple linked.
- The first table is the total number of crimes West Mercia Police have recorded on local systems.
- The second table is the number of unique crimes which have at least one suspect linked to them.
- This is the data that West Mercia Police have used to create the third table where the crimes have been split by Primary Offence Group and Primary Offence Sub Group.
- The fourth table is the number of individual suspects (who may have been linked to more than one offence) broken down by their nationality. West Mercia Police have taken their nationality from their main record. Each time a person comes to West Mercia Police’s notice a record is created for them which is called an iteration, where two or more iterations are noted to be the same person they are linked together as a composite record. These should contain the most recent information the individual has provided. Please note that some have come back as unknown which means that an officer has specifically entered unknown onto the system. This could because the officer did not know, they did not ask, the suspect did not know or was unable to convey the information. Those counted in the blank row are for records where the officer has not entered anything into the field. This could also be for any of the above reasons.
West Mercia Police was unsure what the requestor classified as foreign nationals, eg persons from the Chanel Islands, or persons from British Virgin Islands. Therefore West Mercia Police have included all suspects and their nationality so that the requestor can include as they see fit.
Please see FoI 282791Tables below:-