Criminal Damage to Public Signage

Request Number: FOI/16008

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Hate Crime and Equality

Subject: Criminal Damage to Public Signage

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

Request 1
Since 1 January 2019, how many incidents have been recorded or investigated by the PSNI involving damage, defacement, or alteration to official signs containing the word “Londonderry” (for example, where “London” has been removed, painted over, or obscured)?

Request 2
Of these incidents, how many were
a. Recorded as criminal damage only; and
b. Recorded or flagged as having a hate motivation (e.g. “sectarian”, “religious”, or “political” motivation) in PSNI statistics or internal systems.

Request 3
Please provide any PSNI internal guidance, classification criteria, or operational notes used to determine whether damage to politically or culturally significant signage (such as “Londonderry” or Irish-language signs) should be recorded as a hate-motivated incident.

Request 4
If available, please provide anonymised summaries or excerpts (not full personal details) of any relevant incident logs, press releases, or case notes where damage to “Londonderry” signage was classified as a hate-motivated incident.

If this request exceeds the cost limit, please prioritise items (1) and (2) and advise on the remaining items that could be provided within the limit.

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.

Whilst the information you seek is held electronically by the PSNI, it is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. PSNI is not saying it does not hold the data that you request, however to extract the data you have sought in your request would require a manual trawl of PSNI’s records – hence putting the request grossly over the 18 hour cost limit set out under the FOIA.

There is no specific offence of causing damage to a road sign relating to Londonderry, or to any road sign for that matter. Therefore all relevant offences would need to be manually examined to determine whether the offence involved the described circumstances. The most suitable offence classification would be criminal damage. The information sought is how many of these incidents have been recorded as criminal damage only and how many have had a hate motivation. Therefore we would need to check all recorded criminal damage offence during this period, not just those with a sectarian hate motivation. There are around 16,000 recorded criminal damage offences each year, and around 100,000 for the time period requested.

To manually examine each of these records would take around 10,000 hours and would be over cost. Even if we were to restrict our search to sectarian motivated criminal damage, there would be around relevant 3,000 records, which would take around 400 hours to manually review. Therefore we have determined that this request is over the 18 hour cost limit.

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 the way in which we hold this information, we are unable to suggest a refinement that would bring requests 1, 2 and 4 under the appropriate limit.

In addition, for request 3, the PSNI is guided by victim perception in respect of any complaint (whether recorded as a crime or an incident only) where it believed the action is motivated by hate. There is no internal guidance, classification criteria, or operational notes used to specifically determine whether damage to politically or culturally significant signage (such as “Londonderry” or Irish-language signs) should be recorded as a hate-motivated incident. There is a ‘Hate Crime’ Service Instruction publically available on our website which contains guidance for officers in relation to Hate Crimes. Please follow the link below to our Service Instructions webpage which includes the ‘Hate Crime’ service instruction:

https://www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-policies-and-procedures/corporate-policy/service-instructions