FOI T136/24 - Car Park Crime

I am writing to request the following data for the last three calendar years (2020-2023).

1. The total number of vehicle accidents reported in your local car parks over the past three years.

2. The total number of intentional damages to vehicles reported in your local car parks over the past three years.

3. The total number of thefts from vehicles reported in your local car parks over the past three years.

4. The total number of assaults reported in your local car parks over the past three years.

To note – vehicle accidents and intentional damage as you had grouped as one question originally at point 1 are two separate things. ‘Intentional damage’ would be classed as a crime.  We have therefore renumbered your submission as above to take that into account.

We have taken your term ‘local car parks’ to refer to any public car park within the Northumbria Police area.

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and we provide a response for your attention.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with both the Collision Records and Corporate Development Departments of Northumbria Police. We can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

The information requested is not already held statistically, nor is it held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold. This is particularly relevant at point 1, as there is no search facility that would enable us to extract data down to collisions in car parks. Each collision report for the time frame you have requested would need to be manually reviewed. This would require a minimum of 21,000 such reports being scrutinised. At a conservative estimate of 4 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to locate, extract and compile this information would take over 1,400 hours, therefore Section 12(1) 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.

As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be the remaining questions, as set out above at points 2 – 4.

If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.