FAQ Details
Restorative Justice - 17/10
Dated: 07 Jun 2011
Date of request: 12/01/2010
Date of response: 10/02/2010
Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')(FOIA)
Thank you for your email dated 12 January 2010 in which you made a request for access to certain information which may be held by Northumbria Police.
As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.
You asked:
For the last two calendar years - 2008 and 2009 - can you please provide details of:
The number of offences which were resolved via the accused apologising or "making amends" - known formally as the "restorative justice" approach
What the offence was in each case
What form the "making amends" took in each case - eg, face-to-face apology, making promise never to re-offend
In response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
Northumbria Police has only been dealing with offences by way of Restorative Justice (Community Resolution) since 1 August 2009.
Since that time there has been a total of 1,279 offences resolved in this manner.
The offences include:-
Category Total Comment Violent Crime 380 Made up of Assault without injury, Assault with less serious injury,
Harassment, Exposure, Other violenceViolent Crime 2 Burglary 1 Criminal Damage 241 Drug Crime 1 Other Crime 654 Made up of Dishonesty to obtain services, Dishonesty making false
representation, Making off without payment, Stealing (including
shoplifting), AffrayPlease see our response to 1 above.
A Community Resolution is an "informal" disposal which deals with low level offending. It empowers officers to apply their professional judgement in deciding whether a Community Resolution is the "right thing to do" after considering the offence, victim and offender. Under Northumbria Police guidance if a crime is appropriate to be dealt with under this new process officers can seek the offender's agreement to accept a Community Resolution, which could include: advice to the offender, an apology, or some form of recompense.
We will not be breaking this down further as extracting this information would entail a manual search of all 1,279 offences to identify the outcome. Even at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 42 hours, therefore Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under section 17 of the Act for that part of your request.
You may find of interest information regarding Community Resolution which is available on the Northumbria Police website, in order to aid and assist you I have supplied the relevant link below:-
http://www.northumbria.police.uk/advice_and_information/commres/index.asp
The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.
How to complain
If you are unhappy with our decision or do not consider that we have handled your request properly and we are unable to resolve this issue informally, you are entitled to make a formal complaint to us under our complaints procedure which can be found at: http://www.northumbria.police.uk/foi/disclosurelog/foicomprights.asp
If you are still unhappy after we have investigated your complaint and reported to you the outcome, you may complain directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office and request that they investigate to ascertain whether we have dealt with your request in accordance with the Act.