Grindr Related Crime

Request Number: FOI/14980

Category: Other

Subject: Grindr Related Crime

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:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request 1
How many reported crimes involved the Grindr app in each of the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?

Request 2
Of those cases, for each of the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, in how many were charges successfully brought?

Request 3
How many reported crimes have involved the Grindr app so far this year? (Please specify the months included in the available data)

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.

To retrieve information you seek from our systems, we would have to conduct a keyword search for   word ‘Grindr’. Unfortunately ‘keyword’ searches are an unreliable method of collecting information from the recording database, as they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result.

For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search. In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored in Niche, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited.

In addition, Home Office offence groupings are not held in Niche. A list of the offences linked to people on each relevant occurrence could be produced, however there is no explicit link between offences and the fields checked for the keywords so each occurrence would again need to be manually reviewed to confirm if they are related to the ‘Grindr’ app. Therefore to ascertain if an occurrence meets the criteria of your Request a manual trawl of all crimes recorded in requested timeframe would be required.

Between April 2019 and December 2024, there have been in excess of 650,000 offences recorded. To manually examine each record would take approximately 60,000 hours, therefore this request is 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
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 system limitations we are unable to offer any refinement to your request at present.