Anti Social Behaviour

Request Number: FOI/15775

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Antisocial Behaviour

Subject: Anti Social Behaviour

Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (2) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Question 1
Please provide data of anti-social behaviour reports between August 2019 and July 2025, set out in a month-by-month form. The data should be in disclosed in a granular, non-aggregated
form and shared in .csv format. 
The information included in the columns of the table should include: 
Crime.ID
Month
Reported.by
Longitude
Latitude
Location
LSOA.code
LSOA.name
Outcome
Context
Type of ASB (environmental, personal or nuisance)
Police officer dispatched (Y/N)
Arrest made (Y/N)

Question 2
Where possible, please further break down the type of anti-social behaviour by the 13 types set out by the Home Office and listed below:
1. Vehicle abandoned
2. Vehicle nuisance or inappropriate use
3. Rowdy or inconsiderate behaviour
4. Rowdy or nuisance neighbours
5. Littering or drugs paraphernalia
6. Animal problems
7. Trespassing
8. Nuisance calls
9. Street drinking
10. Activity relating to sex workers or sex working
11. Nuisance noise
12. Begging
13. Misuse of fireworks

Clarification sought
Can you advise what area your request relates to? Is it the area covered by the PSNI?
Also can you advise what LSOA code and name are?

Clarification received
Can I confirm what you mean by ‘area" - if geographical area, I'm asking for all data relating to reports within the PSNIs jurisdiction. 

LSOAs are lower layer super output areas. My understanding is that forces record data using it as a metric.
More info here: 
https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ukgeographies/statisticalgeographies

If this information is already publicly available or you might be able to guide me to another information source, any advice would be gladly received.

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
• made for the same or similar information; and
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

Please note that you are requesting information surrounding LSOAs, which is a geography that is not held on PSNI systems and not used in Northern Ireland in general.

Certain other parts of this request such as 'outcome', 'context' and whether an arrest was made are either not held or would require manual examination of each individual record to determine if PSNI would hold it or not. We can confirm that there are more than 320,000 anti-social behaviour incidents recorded by PSNI in the requested time period, even if as little as 1 minute was spent per record - this would still result in over 5000 hours work, vastly exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

Please also note that providing exact location co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) would be highly disclosure to individuals whose homes would be identified if this information were to be released through this request and therefore would likely result in an exemption.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. Unfortunately due to the reasoning set out above, we are unable to offer any further refinement in this instance. However, you may be interested in the police.uk data archive which provides some of the information that you are requesting, in a format that has been approved by the Information Commissioners Office: https://data.police.uk/archive