FOI T1487/24 - Abusive Behaviour

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

You asked:

 1a. Between 1 November 2019 and 31 October 2024, how many reports of coercive or controlling behaviour did your police force receive?

b.Of these, how many of the victims who made complaints were under the age of 18?

c.Of those in question 1a, how many of the alleged perpetrators were below the age of 18?

2a. Between 1 November 2019 and 31 October 2024, how many reports of violent crime has your police force received, where the allegation was made against a partner or ex-partner

b.Of these, how many of those who made allegations were under the age of 18.

c. Of those in question 2a, how many allegations were made where the alleged perpetrator was under the age of 18.

 Please break each of the above down yearly from 1 November to 31 October, i.e. 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2020, 1 November 2020 to 31 October 2021 and so on.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police.

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, specifically at question 2a of your request 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 at this point refers to the number of reports of violent crime that Northumbria Police received, where the allegation was made against a partner or ex-partner, between 1 November 2019 and 31 October 2024.

After assessing your request, we can confirm that if we were to provide you with specific details you seek, we would be required to search and extract all recorded crimes of 'Violence Against the Person' from locally held systems and each recorded crime would require manual interrogation to determine whether the relationship of the suspect with the victim is recorded or not, and if so collate that data.

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 3 minutes per record.  As per the data there were over 250,000 recorded crimes of 'Violence Against the Person' during the period specified, and as above each of these records would require a manual review to locate, extract and collate the data you seek.

We have calculated, based on the interrogation assessment of 3 minutes per record, that it would take over 12,500 hours to prepare and provide a response to you that satisfies this part of your request.  Similar searches as outlined above would then be required in order to fulfil the remaining parts of point 2, and it should be noted that these may again attract the same exemption.  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.

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 all of point 1 as outlined above.

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