FOI/1787 Big Cat Sightings

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

Thank you for your email received on the 3 November 2025 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 at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

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 the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police.  We can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police.

We are able to disclose the located information to you as follows, with the below caveats to be noted:

• Due to a change in systems it was only possible to search from 1 November 2020 and our response reflects this.

• Searches were conducted on all incidents using the following keywords: "Panther", "Leopard", "Lynx", "Puma" and "Mountain lion". As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the incident comments.  This does not account for any other differences in terminology and/or spelling used.  Also, if the keyword is not used within the incident comments, the incident will not be identified.  The search is limited to the first 800 characters of the incident comments - any information beyond that cannot be searched.

You asked:

Big cat sightings in northumberland last 20 years

Searches conducted specific to your query returned no relevant results (since 1 November 2020, as explained above). Accordingly, this is a nil return for your request.