April 23, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Sexual Offences
Request Number: FOI/14280
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Sexual Offences
Subject: Public Indecency 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 Details
I am requesting information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding incidents of public indecency recorded by your force. Please provide the following details for all recorded incidents of public indecency from 1st January 2022 to the present date:
Request 1
A breakdown of the nature of each public indecency offense, including but not limited to:
a) Public sexual acts (including specifics such as intercourse, oral, or anal sex)
b) Indecent exposure/flashing
c) Public masturbation
d) Other forms of public indecency (please specify)
Request 2
The date and time of each recorded incident.
Request 3
The specific location of each incident (e.g., park, street name, shopping area, public transport).
Request 4
The outcome of each case, including:
a) Arrests made
b) Cautions issued
c) Charges brought and case outcomes (conviction, dropped, ongoing investigation, etc.)
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.
For Requests 1A, 1C and 1D, circumstances of this nature are covered by the offence code for ‘committing an act outraging public decency’. There are around 200 such offences recorded between January 2022 and February 2025 – each of these would need to be manually examined to break them down into the specific types of public indecency requested for Requests 1A and 1C and to specify the other forms of public indecency recorded for Request 1D.
Request 1 needs to be answered in order for a response to be given for Requests 2, 3 and 4. Request 4 would require a manual trawl to identify if the reports resulted in arrest. For ‘outraging public decency’ offences, this information could be retrieved at the same time as the work required for Request 1. However, to retrieve the number of reports resulting in arrests for ‘indecent exposure’ offences would require an additional 760 records to be assessed, taking the total number of records for manual examination to approximately 960 records. It is estimated that it would take 10 minutes to review each record, thus exceeding 160 hours to respond to this request.
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.
We may be able to provide the following within the appropriate limit:
- The total number of offences of ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘outraging public decency’ (with no further breakdown).
- A separate table of occurrence dates/times.
- A table summarising location.
- A table summarising the outcomes that have since been assigned.
- Figures for offences of ‘indecent exposure’ can be provided for January 2022 to February 2025. Figures up to the end of March 2025 will be available once these figures are published on 15th May 2025.
For further assistance, offences of ‘indecent exposure’ are published in the police recorded crime annual trends on a financial year basis. You can find this publication via the following link for Annual Trends in Police recorded crime 1998/99 to 2023/24 (published 29 November 2024):
For complete conviction data we recommend to contact the Department of Justice directly.
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.