Non-Crime Hate Incidents

Request Number: FOI/14045

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Hate Crime and Equality

Subject: Non-Crime Hate Incidents

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 

[Refers to FOI-2022-01167]

Request 1
How many non hate crime hate incidents (NCHI) have been recorded on the records of individuals in Northern Ireland by year, since the offence was introduced to NI?

Request 2
Please list the number of NCHI complaints recorded in all categories of hate, eg on basis of race, trans, gay, sectarian, religion, disability, gender, other, etc? (Please define all hate categories which currently exist in NI).

Request 3
Please advise in how many of these cases the alleged perpetrator has been informed that an NCHI complaint has been recorded on their file?

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. 

Request 3 brings the request in full over cost.

Whilst the information is held electronically, it is not retrievable via automated processes. Additionally, there is no reliable method to identify a non-crime hate incident on our system as there is no indicator within the database that an incident catalogued as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ has not resulted in a charge. Therefore, the only way to ensure accuracy and to sort these is to manually examine all crime records for the requested date range, from 04/05 to present, which would be grossly over cost.

For example, and as per FOI-2022-01167, for the years 2020 and 2021 the number of incidents recorded was a total of 1,610,481. Using an estimate of 5 minutes to examine each occurrence, it would take approximately 134,206 hours to retrieve the requested information to which you seek access for two years alone. Therefore, to retrieve this information for 04/05 to present 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
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.

Request 1 – A ‘non-crime hate incident’ is not an offence or a crime, therefore this request is not valid. Not all hate-motivated incidents will result in the recording of a crime, as what has occurred in the incident may not be of the level of severity that would result in a hate crime being recorded. Some hate-motivated incidents will result in multiple crimes being recorded. Hate crimes are included in the incident count and the two should not be added together.

Request 2 - The number of hate motivated incidents where no crime was recorded, by financial year, is published in our annual Trends in Hate Motivated Incidents and Crimes bulletin.  Additionally, we provide information on the number of hate motivated incidents where no crime was recorded for the race, sexual orientation and sectarian strands in our quarterly Hate Motivated Incidents and Crimes bulletins. These bulletins are published on the PSNI website:  https://www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-publications-and-reports/official-statistics/hate-motivation-statistics

Request 3 - Unfortunately, due to the way in which the information is held, we are unable to provide refinement.

Submission of a refined request would be treated as a new request, and considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including consideration of relevant Part II exemptions.