Crime Statistics

Request: FOI/00013491

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Calls for Service

Subject: Crime Statistics

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(1) 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 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request
I am writing to formally request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, concerning crime statistics within your police force area. In accordance with the aforementioned Act, I hereby request the disclosure of the following data:

Request 1
Crime Reporting and Outcomes: For each calendar year commencing with 2014, please provide an itemized breakdown of the following:

a. The aggregate number of reported criminal offenses.
b. Of the aforementioned reported offenses, the number subjected to formal investigation.
c. Of the offenses investigated, the number subsequently referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration of charges.
d. Of the offenses referred for prosecution, the number that culminated in a conviction in a court of law.

Request 2
Offense Categorization and Suspect Demographics: For the data furnished in response to question 1, please provide a further disaggregation by:

a. Statutory categorization of the offense (e.g., offenses against the person, offenses against property, etc.).
b. Recorded ethnicity/race of the suspected perpetrator(s).
c. Age range of the suspected perpetrator(s).

Request 3
Case Closure Rates: Please specify the proportion of reported offenses that are closed without the filing of formal charges.

Request 4
Further, please provide a breakdown of the principal reasons for such closures (e.g., insufficiency of evidence, withdrawal of complaint by the aggrieved party).

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(1) 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.

Requests 2b and 2c bring the request in full over cost.

Whilst the information is held electronically, it is not retrievable via automated processes. A manual examination of each incident that occurred during the specified date range would be required in order to extract the recorded ethnicity/race of the suspect (note: this is not always recorded for every suspect) and their age. For the financial year 2023/24 alone, 104,344 crimes were recorded. It would take approximately 30 seconds to extract this information per incident. Therefore, it would take approximately 870 hours to provide the requested information for this period alone, bringing the request in full over cost.

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
In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have provided links to several official and published statistics that provide information in relation to your requests and considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit.

Requests 1a-2a and 3-4: These requests can be answered within cost, however, it should be noted that detailed statistics are available in relation to these requests at the following links:

Police Recorded Crime Statistics | PSNI

PPS Statistical Bulletin 2023-24 | Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland

Prosecution and Conviction Statistics | Department of Justice

Requests 2b and c: Unfortunately, due to the way in which the information is stored, we are unable to provide refinement for these requests.