FOI 362324

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 362324

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 27^th September 2024. Please find below the response to your request:

Please could you provide me with the following information, in Excel spreadsheet form if possible:

1) How many incidents of theft from the person were recorded by your police force in the following financial years: 2023/24, 2022/23 and 2021/22.

2) How many incidents of theft from the person were closed without an investigation due to the CCTV trawling timeframe being too long by your police force in the following financial years: 2023/24, 2022/23 and 2021/22.

3) How many incidents of theft from the person were closed without an investigation overall by your police force in the following financial years: 2023/24, 2022/23 and 2021/22.

Reply

Your request for information has been considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”), and I am not obliged to provide the information requested.

S.12(1) of the Act states that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the “appropriate limit”. For police forces in England and Wales, the "appropriate limit" is £450 or 18 hours of work as set by the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.

The information you have requested for question 2 is not available in a readily retrievable format. There are over 1241 records. In order to ascertain whether the information you have requested is held would take in excess of 18 hours as each record would have to be checked individually.

In accordance with s.17(5) of the Act, this acts as a Refusal Notice.

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 the information requested for question 1 as this was retrieved during our initial research. This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests

Q1

Q3

Since the introduction of our current crime management systems in Oct 2017 the process for recording crimes is as follows:

• Officer attends the scene/location
• Officer records the crime/incident on Athena
• On completion of the investigation creation the OIC selects an IMU team to QA/Link/Process
• On completion of the investigation the OIC should enter details of the report/investigations completed to date/actions required
• The Athena investigation is then sent electronically to the Investigation Management Unit team to QA/Link & Process
• The IMU will then QA/Link and for all CRIMES - allocate back to the OIC
• If the OIC requires the crime to be filed, then they request an Outcome 11-20 and this goes to their Sgt for them to file if acceptable
• If there are further investigations, then they complete them and then request an appropriate Outcome, 1 - 10,21 + 22 go to the DDMs for filing, 11-20 go to their Sgts

The only difference to the above is telephone investigators, whose investigations are created and linked by them and then QA'd by their Supervisors and allocated back to them for investigation. If a suspect is identified then these are allocated out to an officer

This means that all reported crimes have some investigation completed and therefore the answer to question 3 would be nil