Crimes Connected to Dating Apps

Request Number: FOI/16772

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics

Subject: Crimes Connected to Dating Apps

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 (PSNI) 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 (ICO) 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:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Request
I'm writing to you in the hope you could help me acquire as much information as possible relating to crimes that have been linked to dating platforms since 2019.

Full disclosure of the data outlined below would be much appreciated, and as specified under the Freedom of Information Act I would be grateful for your advice and direction if you feel there's a way of better refining my request to allow you to retrieve the information I'm interested in.

Please do feel free to contact me to clarify the below request if necessary.

If possible, if you could disclose your response in an Excel spreadsheet that would be really helpful.

For question one, please structure the worksheet with column headings as follows:

Dating platform, No of offences 2019, No of offences 2020, No of offences 2021, No of offences 2022, No of offences 2023, No of offences 2024, No of offences 2025.

For question two, please structure the worksheet with the following column headings:

Date, dating platform, offence description, outcome, victim age, victim gender, suspect age, suspect gender

Request 1
Between January 1 2019 and December 31 2025 inclusive, what was the total number of offences recorded involving the terms Grindr, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble?

Please provide a breakdown of the total number of offences for each keyword, anonymised as necessary to protect the identity of individuals. (Note: I am aware that Grindr and Tinder are often misspelled so I have provided a list of typos below to include in your search for those platforms)

Request 2
For each recorded incident, please provide the following details: date of offence, dating platform/keyword linked to crime, offence description, victim age, victim gender, suspect age, suspect gender and crime outcome where possible, anonymised as necessary to protect the identity of individuals.

According to Google search data these are common typos often used by users searching for these apps, so please include these typos in your searches for these apps to capture common misspellings.

Grindr: Grinder, Grindrr

Tinder: Tindr

Hinge: Hing

Bumble: Bumbl

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.

Although the information is held electronically, it is not retrievable via automated processes. Keyword searches are considered an unreliable method of information retrieval from NICHE as they rely on the system searching through unstructured data. In other words, using this method, we are unable to determine the context of the term found in the search result and therefore, a manual review is almost always required to ascertain whether or not the result meets the criteria of the request. Misspellings are one issue here, but another is words with multiple definitions like 'hinge' and 'tinder'. Therefore, the only way to accurately respond to this request would be to manually examine every individual offence for the date range.

If we focus on sexual offences as an example, there were 4,360 in 2025. Using a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per crime, this would take an estimated 363 hours for 2025 alone and for only one offence type, meaning the request's overall ask would be grossly 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 considered how your request may be d to bring it under the appropriate limit and, unfortunately, due to the way in which the information is stored, we are unable to provide ment for this request.