FOI T109/24 - Hate Crime
You asked:
'Hate crime, England and Wales, 2022/23'* reveals that in 2022/23 Northumbria Police recorded the following figures for two types of hate crime:
race - 2298 (row 2592)
sexual orientation - 722 (row 2594)
Please provide the number of (i) race and (ii) sexual orientation crimes where police officers were the victims.
* Click on the table named 'Hate crime open data tables, year ending March 2012 onwards, second edition.'
On 20/01/24 you added the below to your submission:
I seek information on Northumbria Police officers only.
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and we provide a response for your attention.
Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:
A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
We can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) 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 your request.
We have set out the reasons for this below.
We can confirm that the information requested is not held statistically and it is not held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold.
The information you have requested refers to an individuals occupation, in this case, whether the victims of crimes recorded by Northumbria Police where the motivation was either race or sexual orientation and where the victims were recorded as police officers. After assessing your request, we can confirm that the data collection regime applied for this reporting mechanism does not mandate that the occupation of a victim is provided. If we were to provide you with specific details of victim occupation, we would be required to extract the relevant crime data from locally held systems and each recorded crime would require manual interrogation to determine whether the victims occupation was recorded and if so, if the occupation recorded was relevant to your request.
In considering this, we have conservatively estimated that to undertake the tasks associated with providing you with an accurate and relevant response would equate to approximately 5 minutes per record, As per the published data, there were 722 recorded crimes where the motivating factor was sexual orientation and 2,298 crimes recorded where the motivating factor was race. The total number of crimes recorded is 3,020 and each of those would require manual interrogation in order to provide a response to you.
We have calculated, based on the interrogation assessment of 5 minutes per record, that it would take 251 hours to prepare and provide a response to you that satisfied your request. Accordingly, we can confirm that in this case, this exceeds the cost threshold of 18 hours and we are unable to provide you with the data you require.
We have considered your request and whether there is a realistic possibility of assisting you by refining the remit of your request. Unfortunately, given that the parameters are already clearly defined, it has not been possible on this occasion for us to assist you further and unfortunately we are unable to provide you with any of the information you have requested.
If you are able to provide a revised request which re-defines your requirements, we would of course, endeavour to assist you.